The Trudeau/Freeland/Liberal/ budget presents exactly what I expected: It’s large (historically huge) on spending; and small (or utterly absent) on advancing any notion of personal responsibility, inducing urgently needed productivity increases, or on turning to the tried and true free market and capitalism which — all of those things together — brought us the rich country we now see fading or at least put at such great risk of decent. Rather it insists we rely on them —them who failed us utterly and them who brought us here to start with.
This is a government lacking in that self-awareness, and which steadfastly thinks it needs to control the country and every aspect of it, including every person, business, and institution in it: Control their lives, control their thinking, control their jobs, control their incomes, control their ambition, control their spending, control their families —control everything. This is a classic government-centrally-planned economy — and the same economic thinking that only a few years ago would have been roundly castigated — even by the Liberals — as the sort typically deployed only in one of the few hapless somehow-surviving socialist or communist countries remaining around the world. And moreover, it’s a government bent on a centrally-planned (by government) culture, that they are trying to create and foist upon us, all in their ideological — not your — image.
Andrew Coyne had a good summation:
…But then it had to be long, because this budget is about everything. I mean this in the most literal sense. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland spent half her budget speech listing all the many, many things it was about, before giving up, exhausted: It’s about “finishing the fight” against COVID-19, but also “healing the economic wounds” it has left behind; it’s about “meeting the urgent needs of today” but also about “building for the long term.” On and on she went.
Perhaps some further statistical analysis will help. The word “support” appears nearly 1,000 times in the budget; “benefit” or “benefits” more than 1,300; “gender,” 740, “Indigenous,” 831. By comparison, the word “growth” appears just 280 times; “productivity,” 39, “competitiveness,” 13.
So you begin to get a broad picture of the government’s priorities, or rather the lack of them. It is very concerned to see that no individual, household, corporation, activist group, charity or church picnic in the country is omitted from the rolls of those owing their livelihood to the federal government and their gratitude to its current stewards. It is rather less concerned with how any of this will be paid for…
Missing from Coyne’s stark analysis: mentioning the fact that put any other way, this is the work of socialists, who are radically altering Canada to suit their ideology, if in stages.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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