Feature, Musings —04.20.2021 08:34 AM
—My latest: the budget speech Freeland should have given
“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to table the 2021-22 budget of the Government of Canada. The real one.
I rise to give the budget speech I should have given yesterday, but didn’t. Yesterday, I read out the speech that had been dictated to me by the children in the Prime Minister’s Office — privileged, solipsistic, white children who have a guaranteed paycheque, and who accordingly don’t care or understand what is happening to Canada.
So, I stayed up last night, and remembered that I was once a journalist, and I once cared for the truth. This budget, this speech, is the truth.
Mr. Speaker, we — the former Liberal Party of Canada, which has devolved into a personality cult — have failed Canadians. At the moment of the greatest need, at the time of our greatest peril, we have failed those we had sworn to serve.
Our sins are myriad and undeniable. We entered into a vaccine deal with the Chinese government — a government that has unlawfully imprisoned and is torturing two of our citizens — and pretended to be shocked when that deal fell apart.
When the immensity of our mistake became clear, too late, we stole vaccine doses from Covax, a program that was designed to provide vaccines to the poor of the world. We, a G7 nation, did that.
We permitted international flights into Canada bearing people who we knew — we knew — were infected with the deadly coronavirus. As I stand here today before you, Mr. Speaker, 14 such flights are landing at Pearson airport alone.
Most seriously, Mr. Speaker, we as a government failed to provide the one thing that could save lives, and save businesses, and save families. We failed to obtain enough vaccines.
Tabling a dishonest budget, as I did yesterday, made a bad situation worse. That document was an act of fraud.
How can we claim to be funding affordable child care, after so many decades of making the same promise, and then never delivering on it? How can we, in good conscience, urge Canadians to place their children in places where the virus and its variants, we know now, can flourish and infect?
How can we claim to be concerned with the plight of Indigenous people when we have broken our solemn platform promise to deliver clean water to them, the most basic human necessity?
How can we claim to be levying greater taxation on the wealthiest when our leader, and most of us on this side of the House, have never had to worry about defaulting on a rent or mortgage payment, or worrying about being unable to pay a utilities bill, or simply worrying about having enough left over to feed our children a healthy, sustaining meal?
Mr. Speaker, I do not wish to be known as the one who fiddles while Canada burns. I will leave that legacy to the prime minister.
Instead, my new budget has one single and single-minded focus: Vaccines.
With more vaccines, we will have far less sickness and death. With more vaccines, we will have far fewer bankruptcies. With more vaccines, we will have a health-care system that is not overburdened and collapsing across Canada. With more vaccines, we will have fewer ruined lives.
We are blessed with low interest rates. That is the single reason why we have not had a total financial collapse before now. I therefore intend to use the financial might of the treasury — which is still considerable — to aggressively and relentlessly purchase vaccines, and build a vaccine capability in Canada.
Getting vaccines isn’t health policy, Mr. Speaker. It is the best economic policy.
And that is the policy I intend to pursue, whether the children in Langevin Block approve or not.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.”
— Warren Kinsella was Special Assistant to Jean Chretien
Excellent
Trudeau believes in income equality….. He is making us all poor
Everyone can argue about whether a national child care policy is a good idea or a bad idea but we all know that this bunch won’t deliver so it is the wrong debate. The broken promises can be listed ad nausea. Someone needs to explain to me, slowly, why anyone with an IQ above room temperature would believe that he will deliver on this and what, precisely, is that belief based on. Honestly, inquiring minds want to know. And these were the good old days of relatively small lies:
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-trudeaus-1-billion-surplus-now-a-26-6-billion-deficit
His inability to deliver won’t be confirmed for a few years so there is a very high risk that there will be enough foolish people that will buy this nonsense to win him an election.
Right on
That speech would require an exceptional feat of intellect and a true confessional, both of which are not part of the political condition. Many Canadians, and people of the world are awash in grief, panic and anxiety about death and decay. Maybe this is a neoclassical political lesson to us all. The true measure of government is its utility to its people or maybe it should be the true measurement of the people is the utility of their government.
Your speech is the correct one and metaphorically imprisonable. The clown car just pulled up and I have to leave now.
And the sixth seal was opened and lo it was Budget Day in Canada…. an endless parade of orcs, goblins and trolls marched through ByWard Market, pulling wooden wagons, creaking and trembling from the weight of many billions of dollars of borrowed money. They converged upon the Centennial Flame, whereupon the evil sorceress of deficits commenced with unholy ceremonies, as her acolytes shoveled all the money into the fire. From the roiling flames spewed forth an endless cloud of burning multi-coloured paper images of Laurier, MacDonald, MacKenzie King and Borden. The cinders blacked out the sun and the moon turned Liberal red. Rideau Canal flowed with Canadian Club Whiskey and the vagrants rejoiced. The zombified corpse of RB Bennet sprang forth from the ground and wandered Wellington St., reading aloud the British North America Act… backwards. The four horsemen of Confederation gathered at D’Arcy McGee’s and were served cold cheese bread at the curb side. A thousand flying monkeys descended from the highest perch of the Peace Tower to hammer in lawn signs on the public property around all the exits of the 417. Also, the Maple Leafs were in first place after the trade deadline.
AWESOME FACTS
If her speech was written in her own hand, Freeland would be exceedingly brief: “It’s all Harper’s fault, um, um, um, I mean, C-A-R-N-E-Y-‘-S fault. Sorry, Mr. Speaker, a slip of the tongue.”
Trudeau government’s most vulnerable point: mandated to keep Canadians safe, and the government hasn’t.
Daily flights, coming into the country with Covid cases that turn into spreaders.
Negligent.
Mr. Kinsella – you have outdone yourself, quite simply the best article you have ever written, it is too bad that your old boss, Mr. Chretien was not in charge right now. When can Canada be rid of the definition of, “personality cult personified”…..Trudeau Junior
His old boss promised childcare too. Then it needlessly balanced the books on the backs of the unemployed and had the Mounties pepper spray protestors protesting Canada palling around with Indonesian dictators and savagely cut transfer payments leading to massive provincial debts, again unnecessarily. Liberals are all hypocrites. Vote NDP, the only party that believes in real public services.
Terence,
Darwin,
Don’t most people vote NDP to VOTE NDP? Of course, that’s not how it looks when you vote NDP only to have the NDP vote Liberal by propping them up. Circular logic there in NDP minds but more to the point, it’s really a self-defeating circular firing squad type of logic.
In three Liberal Party years the Magic Central Bank Inflation Fairy Dust will have spread to a point of Finance Canada unprofessionalism vis-a-vis debt-to-GDP which will be 50% debt-to-GDP that Canadians will never extricate themselves from in anybody’s lifetime including that of Prime Minister Trudeau, and his progeny’s progeny.
I fully support Early Childcare Ed and understand why the Liberal Party is using it as an infrastructure base of operations for their lackluster budget. Unfortunately, the math of supporting one sector over another is not sustainable as federal budgets are supposed to be inclusive for the lion’s share of Canadians. Finance Minister Freeland & our esteemed Prime Minister Trudeau are practicing Financial Apartheid whereby the rich wealth extracting haves with assets of the Single Family Home kind are all getting a raise in pay via inflation of their Principal Residence & Single Family House. The rest can take a flying leap for subsidy come September because Liberals don’t give free rises to asset-less renters.
If I inflate all the housing stock across Canada by tapping a central bank lackey for the Federal Reserve in NYC that sits at a desk in the Bank of Canada, but works for his cronies in the Federal Reserve Board of Governors I, for one, could hyperinflate the middle class homeowners’ assets so that inflation on the housing stock could be taxed at twice the rate it is now allowing for successive Liberal governments to fleece the working class renters across Canada even more than we are now via increased tax base.
By hyperinflating the whole Single Family Home portfolio across Canada the bureaucrats in National Revenue and Revenue Canada can double tax base in no time whatsoever, Mr. Speaker.
We could then raise the standards of living for Parliamentarians through Canada’s Single Family Home housing stock and nobody would be the wiser because we have already paid off the CBC Journalists, and most other news media via these inducements, and federal subsidy for newspapers across our great & wonderful insolvent land coast-to-coast-to-coast, Mr. Speaker.
In sum, Mr. Speaker, we Liberals believe that with a lower for longer central bank overnight rate we can eventually print ourselves to a balanced budget off of the inflation we are cooking up covertly against those poor sot Canadians that rent instead of own property all across our great nation.
Thank you, Mr. & Ms. Ordinary Canadian tax donkey mired in servitude to central bank financial largesse, suckers.
RW
The smartest money the Trudeau regime ever spent was when he started bribing Canada’s entire mainstream media;
– What Trudeau calls his “trusted media”;
with $600,000,000 in cash, flowing directly to Canada’s largest media corporations, as well as cash to directly subsidize their reporter’s paycheques;
That cash, with no strings officially attached, no performance metrics, was to supposedly ensure they remain financially ‘robust’.
That $600 million is in addition to the $1.2 billion ($1,200,000,000) of taxpayer money he pays the CBC off with, every single year.
Without those cash bribes, which has indirectly secured their ‘co-operation’:
– government scandals whitewashed or buried
– softball headlines
– propaganda
– puff-pieces;
the devious, incompetent, corrupt Trudeau government, which spends money as if it was endless & without proper financial accounting or value analysis, would never have survived this long.
Trudeau’s abysmal failure to secure vaccines for Canadians is just the latest example in a vast line-up of corrupt, ineffective, illegal & even harmful policy decisions.
However, Trudeau’s vaccine scandal is the first failure that’s costing countless thousands upon thousands of Canadians their financial livelihood, their personal savings, their health & even their lives.
The Trudeau government is the absolute worst government Canada has ever had.
Trudeau’s government is so bad that they’re dangerously threatening the future of our country.
No surprise, given that before being first being elected in Oct 2015, Trudeau said that Canadians had no core values or predominant history.
Trudeau told the New York Times in an interview that Canada was the 1st “post-national” country on the planet.
Later, he announced to a Liberal Party fundraiser for women-only, that he admired the Communist Chinese “basic dictatorship” more than any other government in the world.
Deputy Prime Minister / Minister of Finance Freeland is taking her lead from the worst Prime Minister Canada has ever suffered.
Excellent speech! I wish the current government or at least some in the Liberal party would have the courage to repeat it. With the Liberals still ahead in the polls, I am afraid for the future of our country.
I often wonder what Jean Chretien and Paul Martin are thinking of the current government’s fiscal mismanagement. This current government seems to forget Tommy Douglas’ comment that the great enemy of progressive government is unsound finance. At some point interest rates will increase and there will be pain that will likely be borne by people who can least afford it (those with money and many skills can always leave Canada).
From what I have seen, both Chretien and (more so) Martin have endorsed Trudeau.
It has lowered my opinion of them.
Not to mention the “help” for seniors due to roll out in 2027.
Yeah right
I think I would only add, “We will deliver the vaccines; we will ensure Canadians are safely vaccinated; and then we will get out of the way as quickly as possible. We recognize that the single largest impediment to the Canadian economy in the last year has been that Governments have prevented Canadians from working. We must get out of the way and allow Canadian entrepreneurs and small business leaders to do what they can do far better than any level of Government: grow the economy.”
Justin Trudeau and Team Trudeau view the pandemic as an opportunity.
Justin Trudeau a year ago at the UN ““This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset.”
Chrystia Freeland a week or so ago, “I really believe COVID-19 has created a window of political opportunity”
They are fully focused on political opportunities and resets, so there is little time for vaccines.
Remember this is the group that said Canada was at low risk of Corona Virus, and travel bans were racist.
Too bad we don’t have a medical professional in charge at Health.
Oh silly me, Trudeau wants diversity of appearance, but insists on complete uniformity of thought with his PMO.
The Conservative war room’s attempts to distract from Ford’s outrageous failures by pointing to poor vaccine access is wearing thin. Canada has passed Finland to move up to fifth out of non-tiny Western countries. source https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=CAN~ISR~USA~GBR (table tab)
Canada vaccine access can be called at least above average.
Hilarious. I wouldn’t be bragging about anything with that graph. The former shitshows otherwise known as the UK and the US are crushing us. And the 74-75 Capitals only had 17 hockey teams ahead of them.
Unlike the Capitals, there are more then 150 countries in our league, so we are above average.
The point is how far countries we should be on a par with are ahead of us(as everyone keeps pointing out to you). And you are the one who keeps referring to non tiny countries.
Darwin the Liberal fan boy. Why are all the Liberals pushing this false narrative about vaccines? Read the graph “at least one vaccine dose” now go back and apply the filter to show “fully vaccinated.” Canada drops to 2.1%. The US sits at 21.9% fully vaccinated. Stop the lies Darwin.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EzV3V-rUYAQOR5S?format=jpg&name=small
Darwin, clinics are being cancelled daily across the country because of the lack of vaccines. That means communities have wasted their time, wasted their human resources, wasted funds, added further nuisance and distrust for suffering Canadians. Its not a distraction. It is the most important issue. The Feds should never spend one minute of the day on anything else until they are blue in the face and out of breath.
People are dieing daily in Ontario not because of decisions made six month to a year ago when little was known about the future of the pandemic and how effective vaccines would be, but because of decisions made weeks and months ago to deliberately ignore advice widely and loudly provided to the provincial government and having accurate forecasts of this very thing happening.
Yet the people on this site go on and on about the lack of vaccines instead. Maybe, somehow, if Canada was in the top three in vaccination maybe Trudeau could have saved those people from Ford, but it was Ford who condemned them.
Mr. Kinsella has provided a thoughtful imagining of “what might / should have been.” The current LPC leadership treats this beautiful country like a board game, whereby the players’ mantra is “campaign, win the election, repeat.” They are neither interested in the good of the nation nor its citizens.
Reading through the budget its pretty clear the libs have adopted Magical Monetary Theory in all but name. There will be no plans by them to pay anything down because MMT says you don’t need to if you’re borrowing in your own dollars. You can always just print more and surely interest rates will never go up again since we’ve reached the end of history on those.
And yeah COVID is out and your regularly scheduled climate panic has returned.
Darwin
Canada is third in North America! Wow Justin!
US has 132 million with at least 1 dose
Mexico has 11.25 million with one dose
Canada has 9.31 million with one dose
Source: ourworld in data.
And to put the scope of failure into perspective they were telling us a year ago they had 300 million doses on pre-order.
Deliverology? not so much
Interesting.
Knowing that this isn’t really what the current so-called finance minister actually said the presumptive is that this is what Warren Kinsella would say if he were finance minister today.
I neither criticize nor praise that presumption only state it to indicate my point of view.
That is that Warren feels the best way to deal with this crisis is to nationalize pharmaceutical production in Canada.
You know, have the means of production taken over by the state.
Let me know if that is a misrepresentation and I will gladly retract that.
Joesph
An alternative would have been for the Trudeau government to positively respond to the Canadian companies who offered to make vaccines by saying, “Yes, and how can we help?”
Instead Team Trudeau put their trust in China To top it ofwhen that deal went sour, all we got was silence from Team Trudeau.
The treasury is used to encourage all kinds of economic behaviour without taking over industries. Maybe that is what he wants to do but I don’t think that is what he said.
Ok but here’s the quote
“ I therefore intend to use the financial might of the treasury — which is still considerable — to aggressively and relentlessly purchase vaccines, and build a vaccine capability in Canada.”
If the treasury (aka government agency) is budgeting tax dollars to purchase the means of production that’s a state take over.
But that what I said was, I will retract when the author of the statement says he didn’t mean that.
$40 billion a year in interest payments, based on Freeland’s projected interest rates.
https://financialpost.com/opinion/jack-m-mintz-there-are-no-more-fiscal-anchors-holding-back-the-liberals-after-this-budget/wcm/04db70ae-984d-4f59-807c-b0afb4654ab1/amp/?
Actually the interest payments will most likely be higher. Team Trudeau will keep running deficits. There is no believable plan to get to a balanced budget. So interest payments will increase.
And if interest rates rise to 5%, or 10%? Wow. But, Trudeau and Freeland assure us that won’t happen. Low interest rates are here to stay according to the Literature and History graduates.
Of course there is always the Carbon Tax. Trudeau’s plan to raise it to $170/tonne (or higher), could be used to help balance the budget. What? Did you really think Trudeau’s going to give that money back to you? Wanna buy a high speed rail line? The infrastructure minister will have one for sale. Problem is she has no idea where it will be.
Well said Peter. The “carbon tax” will soon be absorbed in to general revenues. Canadians who believe these funds will be rebated to them are sorely misguided and wilfully stupid. In the meantime, the “carbon tax” is simply a vote buying machine.
The central bank only would increase rates if there was inflation. The thing about is inflation is that it makes debt shink.
Lying about the carbon tax rebate has been the Conservatives main attack on it for quite a while.
Guess the “carbon tax” has bought your vote.
Only if there’s inflation?
I can’t wait to hear your spin when the credit ratings downgrading our bond ratings like they did in the nineties.
That jumped interest rates form four to eight percent and that was with a fraction of the debt load we had now.
Once the Feds are forced to cut you can bet its going to spill down to the provinces too just like last time.
Actually the only thing that shrinks from inflation is the value of the currency.
It doesn’t hurt unless the country has to import most if not all consumable goods, like cars, processed lumber, fuel, the food at the grocery store, appliances, furniture, paper products, electronics etc. Then it hurts.
And it hurts exponentially when the government does everything it can to discourage the means of production through taxes, regulations, and outright bans.
I wish Chrystia Freeland had the integrity to give such a speech. Sadly, she’s just another self-serving politician.
Prime Minister Trudeau’s decision to trust China with vaccines was stupid. For that alone, he doesn’t deserve re-election.
She would have penned an article almost precisely along the same lines as Warren’s piece, if she had stayed in her legitimate line of work. Cult enabling has other demands.
I think we can argue whether Ford locked down too early or too late, and the same with Trudeau and shutting down the airport. The worst things were;
1) When Canadians wanted border shut in Feb. 2020, Trudeau called them racist. In hindsight, those Canadians were right,
2) Trudeau signed up for a vaccine with China instead of reputable Western companies, nor with existing Canadian vaccine companies.
3) When businesses needed money, he funneled $1B to his friends at WE, plus some other former Liberal firms with no history of producing PPE,
5) When Canadians returned home, he forced them into hotels. Previous generations of leaders helped repatriate Canadians (i.e. from Lebanon). Even the early Covid returnees from April 2020 he put up in barracks. But in Jan 2021, trapping 100’s of thousands of snowbirds, Trudeau prevented them from getting home, and forced them into additional economic hardship.
1 and 5 seem to be contradicting eachother.
3) There are other, larger programs available for businesses.
Can argue with 4).
“”The premier is looking at other jurisdictions where we may be able to buy some of the vaccines directly,” Elliott said on Tuesday.
Critics counter that the federal government is responsible for procuring vaccines and dealing with the consequences of delays, and the premier should focus on the primary fight at hand.
“What the premier needs to do is stay in his lane,” said Liberal MPP John Fraser. “The premier’s job is to [implement] the public health measures necessary that people need to get through this pandemic.””
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ford-absent-from-ontario-legislature-for-second-day-as-critics-openly-call-for-his-resignation-1.5395187
From one of the articles on this page. Don’t these moronic “critics” and “Liberals” understand that this is how people in the real world react when someone else is not doing the job they are supposed to be doing, particularly when it is actually killing people. THE PRIMARY FIGHT AT HAND IS GETTING VACCINES. And this is laughable:
“”He’s hiding from the media too, not making himself available to any reporters since his disastrous press conference last week,” Del Duca said. “It’s become clear that Doug Ford is scared to face the people and acknowledge his stunning incompetence.””
Ford has been trying to get vaccines for a while now. If Trudeau is so incompetent one would think Ford would have found some by now, but most of the counties he has been calling have lower vaccination rates then Canada.
Vaccines delivered has always a been a ridiculous straw man that the little kids in the short pants came up with because they knew this would be a disaster and they aren’t even hitting the straw man goals. Bottom line, USANIAN shit show right next to us is crushing us. Everything else is conversation.
Team Trudeau’s internet censorship bill will make it difficult if not impossible to criticize the Trudeau government.
Excellent! Told it as it is. Straight to the point!
I think you are overestimating Christia Freelands intelligence.
The past 6 years have shown that every single last one of these Liberal MP’s have Zero morals or ethics, and likely lack the wisdom to realize that massive harm they have done to the country.
It is a fact of living that no one can please everyone.
Politicians always speak good intentions but fullfilment of any statement is what matters. In today’s time we need to reset our human values.
“How can we claim to be funding affordable child care, after so many decades of making the same promise, and then never delivering on it? How can we, in good conscience, urge Canadians to place their children in places where the virus and its variants, we know now, can flourish and infect?”
Is it too jaded to think that the main reason I believe this will actually come through this time, is because the Libs are simply catering to their corporate bosses, and trying to make it as easy as possible for people to go to work?
Nevermind about housing, nevermind about access to vaccines, or a national sick day policy so that Canadians across the country are treated equally, and can avoid the ravages of the pandemic – nope, subsidized childcare, cause we know that no one can afford to have a stay at home parent anymore these days, and frankly, we like it that way. Get back to work plebes.