Ahead of an important fiscal update this week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is demanding Prime Minister Mark Carney cap the federal deficit at $31 billion, in part by eliminating big ticket items like a major rail project and the gun buyback program.
“We should have no deficit,” Poilievre wrote in a letter to Carney. “And if I were Prime Minister right now, we would be on track to achieving that. But your Liberal government has made that impossible for this year.”
The $31 billion cap Poilievre proposes is what the former Trudeau government projected the deficit to be for the 2026-27 fiscal year when it tabled the 2024 fall economic update.
Poilievre obviously doesn’t understand money. Whether spending more money than you have in the bank account can make sense depends on what you are spending it on. Spending it on growing our economy and creating jobs makes it an investment that will create greater returns than the interest on it. Spending it to help people pay for rent and food when there is a pandemic and they are not able to work makes sense. Certainly not all of our debt was spent wisely but also certainly not all debt is bad either.
Poliestre went from high school to uni to a political job, and never once had a hair net and name tag. He has no idea about money, working, punching a clock, fretting about rent, draining a fry vat, re-stocking a shelf (grocery or VHS) or paying the visa with the mastercard.
Despite this, he’s learned the cost of everything while knowing the value of nothing.
He knows that austerity leads to hate, hate leads to voting out of spite, and voting out of spite leads to a conservative government. And his rich friends will be pleased if they can get in while we’re already accustomed to going without because they get more.
$1.44T in debt means $54B a year in debt servicing that could have been spent on services for taxpayers.
Did you have a point?
$1.44T in debt means $54B a year in debt servicing that could have been spent on services for taxpayers.
That argument is always silly, the money wouldn’t have exist if it wasn’t for need to service debt money’s not real at that scale its just strokes of the pen. We don’t provide services because a subset of the population doesn’t want that, no other reason.