Bad government policies force people to make tough decisions.
“We decided to live in our garage.”
That’s what a couple told the Canadian Taxpayers Federation during the recent Debt Clock tour in Alberta.
The drywaller and his wife stopped by to watch the federal debt going up in real time on the jumbo screen the CTF has bolted to the side of a cube truck, dubbed the Debt Clock.
Jon, the tradesman who had pulled up in an older pickup truck, watched the debt numbers racing up past $1.2 trillion, and he winced.
“My parents worked hard and they were able to reach the next step,” he said at the gathering in Red Deer. “But my wife and I are working harder and we aren’t getting ahead, we can’t even see the next step.”
The federal debt numbers are mind-numbing.
Right now, it’s more than $1.2 trillion.
By later this year, the Trudeau government will have doubled the debt after less than a decade in power.
Think of the prime ministers – Harper, Mulroney, Pierre Trudeau, Diefenbaker, William Lyon Mackenzie King, all the way down the history railway back to Sir John A. MacDonald – who came before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Picture the debt under all those governments, stacked up – debts incurred during wars, recessions and a depression.
Now double it.
That’s what the current incarnation of the Trudeau government will have achieved, with a federal debt of more than $1.2 trillion.
A trillion is such a big number. If you tried counting it in loonies, it would take you 30,000 years.
If you put those debt loonies down, edge to edge, they’d circle the planet about 793 times.
Canadians will pay about $54 billion just to cover the interest charges on the debt this year. That’s about how much we all pay in the GST every year. Think about that. Every nickel in GST goes to debt interest charges.
And it’s not getting better.
This year, the Trudeau government delivered a budget with a $40 billion deficit, with no plan to ever balance it.
When it comes to the debt, inflation caused by printing money, or the financial strain from increased taxes, the numbers are scary.
But it’s downright grim to see how ordinary working people are getting battered by the Trudeau government’s bad management.
Our couple in Red Deer, Jon and Rebecca, buy older houses. They work together for about a year to gut the homes down to the studs, reshaping the main floor so there are three bedrooms upstairs and a new bathroom.
“It makes them so much better for families, much more functional for parents,” Rebecca said.
The couple buys all the gyprock, lumber, light switches and paint along the way, with costs piling up.
“The clients are very pinched right now, so we are trying to save on costs while keeping the quality,” Jon says.
Inflation is ballooning their supply costs, while the carbon tax is hiking their transportation costs.
But it’s Trudeau’s crazy home taxes that are biting them the hardest.
“We were living in the houses, roughing it in a construction zone, but the government called us ‘house flippers,’ even though we owned the place and lived in it while working on it,” Rebecca added.
“Then we started living in a tiny place offsite, hauling the tools back and forth, but now we are worried about the capital gains tax hike, so we decided to live in our garage and keep working on the house,” she said.
“After these crazy home taxes, we hope we still have enough to make a living, but now we are hearing scary things about a home equity tax, so I don’t know what we are going to do and I am bracing myself to talk to the accountant,” Jon concluded.
The Trudeau government’s reckless spending, spiralling debt and constant tax hikes are hurting everyday Canadians.
To fix this, the government must stop wasting money, balance the budget, and cut taxes to stop punishing hardworking people like Jon and Rebecca.
It shouldn’t take a jumbo screen on wheels showing the debt in real time to understand this.
Kris Sims is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
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