Trudeau can’t hide economic failure any longer
We get told a lot of lies mostly by the media and government. The problem with lies however is that sooner or later the truth will intrude. That is happening now in Canada. For years the media lied to us about how great the country was doing with Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister. That was never true. Canada is a mess and that can’t be hid any longer. People struggling to make ends meet won’t believe the lies any longer.
Justin Trudeau is an incompetent fool who should never have been allowed to run the country. Trudeau’s incompetence could have been hidden by a competent supporting cast but Trudeau went out of his way to pick a cabinet that was just as stupid as he is. Together this group of ideological nitwits has done irreparable harm to Canada and at no time did their self-professed virtuosity benefit Canadians.
To the left, diversity and inclusion trump competence. They believe that their obvious moral superiority will magically provide for everyone. In the words of the ultra-virtuous Justin Trudeau “the budget will balance itself”.
I wrote that in June when I pointed out that Canada’s GDP per capital has fallen ever since the day Trudeau took office. For a while Trudeau was able to hide this failure by ramping up immigration and government spending. The spending artificially inflated the GDP because for some bizarre reason economists count government spending when calculating GDP. In the short term government spending can cover for failures but sooner or later people question where the money went.
The fiscally conservative Canadian Taxpayers Federation is one of the most dedicated monitors of rising federal spending. In comments to the National Post, federal director Franco Terrazzano summed up the state of federal finances thusly: “They’re essentially spending more money on everything forever.”
The same can be said about immigration. Increasing the population does increase the size of the economy but not necessarily the GDP per capita. That is the situation Canada is in. GDP is growing but GDP per capita is falling. The size of the pie is not increasing as fast as the number of people who want a piece of it.
By playing down per capita data, the Trudeau government is hiding Canada’s economic anemia behind an immigration boom
Once you adjust for population growth, it’s clear that our standards of living are actually declining at an unprecedented rate, which the federal government seems happy to ignore. This problem will almost certainly continue until the public starts to understand the economy in per-capita terms and demands more accurate economic indicators from its political leaders.
Immigration is a sacred cow in Canada. Canadians are conditioned to believe that immigration is always a good thing. But that is not true; immigration can be good or bad. It depends on how you do it, and Canada does it poorly. We cannot hide it any more immigration is harming our economy.
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any economist in Canada that doesn’t believe that the exceptionally high population growth rates we’re experiencing now have contributed to that decline in GDP per capita that we’re seeing,” Skuterud said.
“Some people are going to win, they’re going to benefit from increased immigration, while others are going to lose and so there are important changes in welfare within the population. And I feel like we’re not talking enough about that,” he said.
The dirty secret is that immigration is always win/lose situation. If we take only the skilled workers and entrepreneurs we win and their home countries lose. If we take only low skill workers then the home countries win and we lose because the newcomers will never pay more in taxes than they take from the system.
Canada used to emphasize skilled workers and entrepreneurs but successful people can’t be counted on to vote liberal. The old system was thrown out in favor of family re-unification and diversity. The new system admits more takers and fewer makers. The takers can be counted on to do 2 things. Vote liberal and make Canadians poor.
Immigration should be an economic decision not a partisan political decision. Canada needs to go back to the old system that prioritized economic growth. Countries are not charities. Canada has no obligation to take people who make the rest of us poor just because they are likely to vote liberal.
