Excess government intervention has caused Canadian productivity to lag

Canada's high employment does not reflect higher output, just lower productivity

Low productivity is fuel for inflation. Canada has that disease in spades. Trudeau is the problem.

Canadian productivity has been falling since Trudeau took office after his 2019 re-election. It is a dismal picture.

Both Canada and the United States are enjoying higher employment levels than pre-pandemic and the higher employment is a source of pride for the Liberal government. Higher employment and lower unemployment are great fodder for campaign speeches and will no doubt be part of the Liberal rhetoric in the next election. Trudeau is already crowing about the low unemployment on Twitter.

But under the hood, the economic engine of Canada is sputtering. Nearly full employment and virtually no increase in per capita GDP while America is enjoying a relative economic boom despite lower percentage growth in employment. Why?

Part of the higher employment in Canada is big government. The cost of running the Canadian government has risen $151 billion a year under Trudeau. Trudeau has added 80,000 bureaucrats to the federal payroll since 2015. Those added bureaucrats make it their daily routine to find ways to meddle in the Canadian economy. Give billions to Volkswagen and Stellantis to build plants they need anyway, give speeches about “climate change” as a way to promote the leftist nonsense about CO2 causing global warming, hike carbon taxes and make it more costly to afford fuel and energy, enact the Impact Assessment Act to stifle growth in mining, energy and forestry, and claim success while censoring free speech and limiting personal freedoms.

The 80,000 new bureaucrats needn’t worry. They get regular pay raises, indexed pensions, and plent of perquisites as civil servants. The fact that they contribute virtually nothing to economic growth can safely be ignored by the Liberals since they will likely vote for the party that hired them.

Success is hollow when our adult children can’t afford to buy a home, when inflation has made it harder to put food on the table, and when kids are spending more time learning the correct pronouns than studying the mathematics, physics and chemistry that propel innovation, and when thousands of Canadian youth are dying from opiod overdoses and the government response is to make narcotic drugs more freely available to them.

Canada is in trouble and Trudeau is the culprit. If there is to be any future for our youth, we need to send him packing at the earliest opportunity.