Budget 2021: A Major Bust for Albertans
Plus the failed Liberal FTHBI program, the federal government will allow Alberta to create its own police force, upcoming internet censorship legislation, and more.
Budget 2021: A Major Bust for Albertans
It has taken the Ottawa Liberals two years to get around to tabling a budget. On Monday, the Liberals tabled the largest spending budget in Canadian history. The 742-page document authorizes $497.6 billion in expenditures including $101.4 billion in new spending.
This year, the Liberals are planning to add $154.7 billion to the national debt, bringing the total national debt to a staggering $1.3 trillion. For context, in 2015 when the Liberals formed government, the total national debt was $634 billion. The Liberals have added $660 billion to the national debt. That is more than all previous governments in Canadian history combined. From 1867 until 2015, Canada fought in two World Wars, the Korean war, survived the Great Depression, and persevered through the Great Recession, and federal governments responded with extraordinary levels of spending, and the Trudeau Liberals will see our national debt double in their 5 ½ years in office.
It seems the Liberals are throwing every left-wing economic idea at the wall and hoping something sticks. In this process, the Liberals have turned away from tried and true fiscal management towards risky borrowing that will leave kids paying for today’s Liberal mismanagement.
Albertans who were expecting a plan for economic recovery and needed help to get energy projects built and energy workers back to work will be sorely disappointed. In the 742-page budget, Alberta was only mentioned 16 times. Each time Alberta was mentioned, it was in the context of a virtue-signaling goal as if Alberta happened to be the background setting for an important virtue the Liberals felt needed promotion. There was no discussion of how to get critical energy infrastructure built, and no discussion about how to get Alberta’s world-class energy sector back to work. Mentions of pipelines in the Liberal budget were limited to: “talent pipeline”, “innovation pipeline”, “pipeline for vaccines”, and “pipeline of personal protective equipment.” There was no mention of any pipeline to transport oil and gas or energy of any sort.
The big-ticket item in the Liberal budget was their plan to enact universal, institutional daycare and early learning with a price tag of $30 billion over the next 5 years, with $8.3 billion ongoing. The Liberals have promised to cut the costs of daycare by 50% by 2022 and an average of $10 per day by 2025. The Liberals have yet to outline how they would actually accomplish this and how they plan to work with provinces to make this a reality, and they also didn’t bother informing the provincial premiers. In Alberta, only 1 in 7 parents choose institutional daycare for their kids, and Alberta currently has some of the most generous parents-choice driven childcare subsidies. There are 23,000 families in Alberta that currently pay about $13/day for childcare. Parental choice should be the primary driver of childcare, not expensive, added government bureaucracy. There is additionally no mention of whether flexibility and choice will be prioritized to ensure shift workers and those with irregular hours can also benefit.
This budget contains money for everyone with no signs of any type of fiscal restraint. From $7.2 million for Canadian authors to go to an international book fair to $36 million to add a “climate lens” to all government policy to another extra $21 million for the CBC to $41.7 million for the CRA to improve a single webpage portal, the government has failed to provide any restraint to future generations aren’t left paying for today’s spending.
This budget contains money for everyone with no fiscal anchors and no plan to grow the economy and spur job creation. It’s an election budget, not a recovery plan. Every page of the 742-page budget is costing Canadians an average of $213,674,033. I will be voting against the budget. Over the next coming weeks, there will be several confidence motions on the budget, where the government may fall, and a subsequent election will be called. I will be sure to keep you updated.
A 2019 Election Gimmick for First-Time Homebuyers Fails
More data is in; halfway through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s (CMHC) flagship three-year program to help first-time homebuyers and it is failing. The First-Time Home Buyer Incentive or FTHBI was expected to help 100,000 Canadians between September 2019 and September 2022. The program has the federal government obtaining a shared equity stake with the prospective homeowner and repayable in the future. As of January 31, 2021, the program had only 9,108 approved applicants and that does not mean the prospective buyer actually followed through on the approval meaning the actual amount of Canadians helped could be much lower.
I have been sounding the alarm about the FTHBI from its first days. So, to the Ottawa Liberals – I told you so. I get no satisfaction from being right. At a committee appearance in May 2019 I questioned the then head of the CMHC on the soundness and logic of the numbers. None of the numbers made sense. In an op-ed in August 2019 right before the FTHBI program was set to go public, I walked Canadians through the illogical projections and warned the federal government they were going to fail. A half-year later, I wrote a formal letter in May 2020 with my colleague MP Stephanie Kusie warning the federal minister for families and responsible for the CMHC that none of the program milestones or targets were going to be reached. This even after the federal government adjusted the program criteria to incentivize more applicants and make it easier to obtain an approval.
Why is this important? After all, only a fraction of the $1.25 billion set aside was spent on supporting prospective homebuyers. The true problem is this program was billed from the outset as the primary means of helping first-time homebuyers and it was never going to meet that target. The CMHC was warned. The political leadership was warned repeatedly and they didn’t listen. By the time this program is complete, the federal government will have wasted three years trying to make this failed idea work. That is three years of wasted effort when first-time homebuyers saw increasing difficulty getting into the real estate market. There is an opportunity cost to government action, they could have been working on a different solution or more appropriately recognize that the free market behaves in ways experts cannot predict and practice some humility instead of attempting to manipulate it.
Federal Government Confirms Alberta Can Create Police Force
On April 12, 2021, the federal government tabled a response to a petition from constituents asking they made a public statement that should the Alberta government undertake to fulfill the Fair Deal Panel recommendation to create a provincial police force that the Canadian government will support the transition. The Canadian government has confirmed and said “should any contract jurisdiction elect to terminate or not renew its Police Service Agreements the Government of Canada would fully cooperate … to facilitate an efficient and orderly transition of police services from the RCMP to a new independent police service.” A little history is in order.
Prior to joining Confederation, the territories that made up Alberta were policed by the North West Mounted Police and the Dominion Police, and both would later be merged to form the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. For a brief time in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Alberta government had its own community police service mostly to enforce prohibition laws of the day. The cost of policing then and the financial calamity known as the Great Depression led to the Alberta police service being abolished. Since then, the major cities have had their own police services while smaller communities and rural regions have had the RCMP to patrol their range roads and streets.
But Alberta of the 1930s, cash strapped and sparsely populated, is not the Alberta of today with 4.3 million people and despite the financial downturn still 20% richer per capita than our Ontario counterparts. The provincial government created the Alberta Sheriffs due to a lack of RCMP resources in 2006. Originally intended to supplement RCMP needs, they have now become the backbone of community policing across Alberta. In 2011, our provincial government extended the RCMP police service agreement until 2032 but included a termination clause of 24 months should either the federal government or Alberta decide to terminate it early.
In 2020, after extensive public consultations across the entire province, a panel of eminent Albertans reported back in the Fair Deal Panel and recommended that Albertans once again take up community policing and terminate the RCMP contract. This would mean that a new police service or an expanded Alberta Sheriffs would takeover community policing while the RCMP would be able to focus on national policing tasks such as counter-terrorism, money laundering, and organized crime.
Now the federal government has indicated in a public statement in response to a petition by constituents that it would indeed support such a transition should Albertans decide to exercise their constitutional right to once again manage their community police service.
Fighting for Jobs and Rapid Testing
Visby Medical has deployed its 15-minute rapid testing device across the United States with great success. Visby Medical has applied for Health Canada approval, but they have been given the run-around, and have yet to receive approval from Health Canada. Visby intends to use LaunchCode, a business that employs several constituents in Calgary Shepard to work on large-scale software solutions.
I have written to the Health Minister several times on the necessity to approve rapid testing devices. I have yet to hear back from her. This week, I sent her an unused version of the Visby device. This is a solution that would allow more businesses to remain open and would create jobs in Calgary Shepard. I’m anxious to hear back from the Minister on this common-sense testing solution.
New Internet Censorship Legislation Coming
On Monday, April 19 while speaking with the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, said that the Liberal government will be tabling an internet censorship bill to promote, “content moderation” within the next couple of weeks. The contents of the bill have yet to be released, but the Minister has said that a government entity will be moderating and flagging content, and once the content has been flagged it will have to be taken down within 24 hours.
I think we can all agree that there is a lot of cruelty and hateful content online; however, having a faceless government bureaucracy moderate what we can and can’t see online will only add to existing tech censorship problems. There will be no other entity to keep this increase of government control in check.
The Minister has not held any public consultations on this new bill, but if you have thoughts you can email the Minister at hon.steven.guilbeault@canada.ca.
Cesla Zbrojovka Group Buys Colt Canada
Recently, Czech gunmaker Ceska Zbrojovka Group (CZG) announced its acquisition of Colt Holding Company for $220 million, a transaction that includes the purchase of Colt Canada. Through the transaction, CZG would be able to offer financial stability for Colt and create additional jobs in Canada. The new partnership cements CZG’s status as one of the world’s premier companies in firearms manufacturing and opens a new corridor in further strengthening Czech-Canadian bilateral relations.