Moonbox

I'm complaining specifically about you. Instead of spamming the forum with the same junk over and over with different headlines, try putting half a moment's thoughts into your post. We get it. You really don't like Trudeau. $600k to promote cultural events, vaccines etc is hardly an abuse, but when your panties are twisted you can get mad about anything. I'll worry about other stuff. Special thanks to True North news for their (as usual) brilliantly stupid "journalism".

I think this is probably better for another topic, but it smells fishy and I'm tired of our successive governments (provincially and federally) cowering about doing something about obvious sources of corruption and abuse.

The absolute numbers aren't very useful without context when you consider that Canada's population grew by about 20% under that Liberal government. Hopefully we can agree that an extra ~5.5 million Canadians would expand the requirement for government services and administration, and thus other measurements are needed. That's why we can use per-person spending if you don't want to look at debt-to-GDP. You have to adjust for inflation, which is required for any useful analysis. I did already post the link for those numbers: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/both-trudeau-and-harper-increased-size-of-federal-government Prime Minister Harper also increased the size of the government. According to data from the federal Department of Finance, the Harper Conservatives increased per person spending (inflation adjusted) from $6,992 in 2005 to $7,740 in 2014—an increase of 10.7 per cent. ... Before Chretien took office in 1993, per-person program spending was $6,995. At its lowest point, Prime Minister Chretien reduced this number to $5,806. Although per-person spending inched up to $6,670 near the end of his tenure, the amount was still lower compared to when he took office. I've already provided it. You're focusing on plain/absolute dollar values which are of limited use. I'd have more sympathy for Harper if not for the fact that he slashed public revenue with poorly-designed tax cuts and tax credits that were of minimal benefit to the average Canadian.

Well geez you sure got me there captain pedantic. Either way the hot-take thread title and the article West posted was a joke, with none of the money being used for what it suggested. The numbers aren't what are being questioned. The retarded TNC article the hot-take title it used are. I don't know about you but I'm not really too concerned with $142,000 spent on heritage and cultural events on the federal level. That's about as small-potatoes as things get but when you're posting a new thread daily on this forum I guess you really have to reach for things to get upset about.

I still don't know what you're talking about with it tbh.

Oh I think something else about you entirely, but you were commenting that this somehow a Liberal thing, and I'm just looking to assure you it isn't. ? Whatever you are, it's certainly not centrist. I'm not sure where hyperbolic conspiracy theorist really fits on the spectrum. Can't accept this. It's MSM fake news.

We saw this during the Harper era when he fired the head of Canada's nuclear watchdog back in 2008 for objecting to running the Chalk River nuclear isotope facility without backup power generators. I guess this is okay because the Conservatives did the firing? ?

Circumstances/environment matter, but that doesn't mean the government's actions don't. I didn't change my argument. I said Harper increased spending no matter what measurement you use. except it wasn't just that. The Chretien Liberals decreased spending per person noticeably over the same period, and those numbers are inflation-adjusted. By contrast, Harper increased per-person spending by over 10%. These numbers are also included in your RBC links. You can certainly make the argument that that GDP growth can improve your debt-to-gdp ratios and obscure the government's "performance", but you can use more absolute numbers like per-person spending (probably the best apples-to-apples number) and the conclusions are the same. By any available measurement, Harper grew the government substantially and what hurts the most about it is that he did so while implementing poorly-targeted tax cuts that most economists criticized him for at the time and that have delivered questionable results. Increasing spending while decreasing revenues is a poor recipe for sound fiscal measurement. The big caveat here though is that Trudeau's doing an arguably much worse job. The point I'm trying to make is that fiscal credibility is a lot more complicated than "Blue good, every other color bad". We need to look at a government's records and platforms and judge them by the numbers rather than by heuristics or mythical narratives. The Trudeau Liberals are a very different breed than the Chretien/Martin Liberals.

I think my chart was quoting aggregate provincial/federal debts in Canada, so yours is probably better. My bad. Here's everything side by side: I'm not sure why you think this is so remarkable. Harper inherited the large surpluses and strong finances of the previous liberal government and all he had to do to lower debt-to-gdp was not squander those surpluses immediately. The reality is that government spending increased under his leadership by any measurement. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/both-trudeau-and-harper-increased-size-of-federal-government Prime Minister Harper also increased the size of the government. According to data from the federal Department of Finance, the Harper Conservatives increased per person spending (inflation adjusted) from $6,992 in 2005 to $7,740 in 2014—an increase of 10.7 per cent. Prior to Harper taking office in 2006, federal government spending as a share of the economy was 12.5 per cent. By the end of his tenure, Prime Minister Harper had increased spending (as a share of GDP) to 13.0 per cent. No matter how you slice it, the Harper Tories increased the size of the federal government. In contrast, the Liberals under Chretien reduced government spending as a percentage of GDP from 17.1% to 12.5% when they were done. Worse, however, is that Harper increased spending while cutting taxes and reducing revenues. Feel free to criticize Justin Trudeau, because he's looking like he'll blow our finances up over the next four years, but Harper was hardly the fiscal conservative everyone pretends he was.

They're using net debt to GDP instead of gross debt, with the difference being that net debt subtracts the government's financial assets from the gross debt levels. For Canada in particular, net debt is a terrible measurement of overall indebtedness because of how public pension plans are managed and operated compared to other countries. Specifically, most countries like the US fund social security purely through government debt. On their balance sheets, bonds/treasuries are listed as "assets" for social security, but then a debt is listed on the federal government's balance sheet to correspond. The result is no change in "net debt". CPP and QPP, however, are actively managed and not required to buy government securities (unusual around the world). The plan's holdings are wide and varied. Most of the CPP's assets are still included in the national net debt calculation, but there is no associated liability. This enormously inflates the value of the federal governments "assets", despite the fact that those assets and their earnings are already spoken for in future pension liabilities. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/caution-required-when-comparing-canadas-debt-to-other-countries.pdf (it's a long, but interesting read). The CPP's open mandate has been a huge boon to public finances and saved taxpayers loads of money and required contributions, but it has rendered "net debt" a fairly useless international measurement for Canada. It's worrying because the Trudeau government parades our relatively reasonable net-debt levels around as justification for their spending, but the numbers are actually much worse than they would have you believe. https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/government-debt-to-gdp

When I start quoting facebook and social media posts, rabble.ca or other dinky websites like that, you can accuse me of trawling for fringe news to confirm and reinforce my delusions. The CBC? Lol no. I've argued here on this forum in the past that it's heavily biased and I don't think they should be publicly funded to promote editorial views/biases. You don't really believe in fact-checking though, do you? ? There's all sorts of media fact checkers out there and quick google searches can dispel most of the dumbest conspiracy theories we see peddled here, but that's just more fake news. It's such a comfy and self-serving delusion. When anything/everything that goes against your worldview is automatically "fake MSM news" and part of the conspiracy, you really don't have to do a lot of critical thinking.

That's true, but governments have a tendency to match spending with economic growth and we've not really had a government since the Chretien/Martin Liberals who've avoided this temptation. The debt-to-GDP ratios (a far more useful calculation) rose substantially under Harper (from around 70% in 2006 to around 90% by 2015) and continued to rise long after we came out of recession. In Trudeau's first four years, debt to GDP fell. Going through COVID-19 will change the story completely, but as an economic shock this was an order of magnitude larger than the financial crisis. The economic impact of the two aren't really even close. I've very little faith that Trudeau's policies and spending in the coming years will be helpful and he's clearly (IMO) sending us on the same path his father did (drowning in debt). What always bothers me about these conversations, however, is silly notion that the Conservatives are by definition more fiscally prudent, and that the Liberals are somehow automatically not. Up until COVID-19, the criticism against Trudeau's spending was wildly overblown and the nostalgic/revisionist memories of Harper's fiscal conservativism was fantasy. The difference here really is that Harper cut taxes and and ran up deficits doing it. Justin Trudeau is going to take us on a social spending spree with Jagmeet Singh and I don't like where's it leading. If I had to choose, I'd take Harper, but it's a shame we can't find someone who'll just pay down the damn debt rather than squeeze us from the right or the left.

but I didn't say that, nor did I say Justin was the same as Harper. My argument was never anything more than that Harper wasn't fiscally conservative, that he spent heavily and ran up huge debts, and that we haven't had a federal government seriously tackle our accumulated debt since Chretien/Martin.

Chretien's deficit reductions were the only ones we've seen in the last 40 years that amounted to anything. What sources are attaching Harper's name to that? Come on dude. The numbers are there. I voted for Harper. I'd take him back in a heartbeat over Justin. Again, let's just not play revisionist history and pretend he was a master of tackling deficits. He grew them - a lot. He was not anywhere near as bad as Justin is or will be, but he was no fiscal miracle worker. He was a cynical pragmatist and spent his way out of being defeated by non-confidence during his minority governments.

Denial and self-delusion. They trawl the depths of the internet for things that support their worldviews and share it amongst themselves on social media. Before long they're all referring to the same bullshit article or discredited science but they've repeated it so much to each other that they actually believe it's true. Anything that conflicts with this junk is "fake news". Anything coming from MSM is untrue by default, facts and reasonability be damned...unless of course it supports their viewpoint in which case they'll happily refer you to it. ? Diversifying your content. There's nothing wrong with watching the news on TV, but read stuff (even print news and online) too and just look at lots of different sources to see the different biases. The MSM can usually be at least relied on to report the basic facts and will generally not outright lie, but the way they report it will differ greatly from Fox News on one end to something like CNN or the CBC on the other. When I say the MSM can generally report the facts, I mean their actual journalists and news reporters. Their editorialists and personalities (like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity or Chris Cuomo) say whatever the hell they want and aren't really worth listening to. The folks who are "lambasting" you aren't living on the same planet. If you're only watching one news source then maybe you need to spread out, but take it as a badge of honor if the conspiracy theorists are on your ass. It's confirmation that you're living in reality.

I don't think there's anything wrong with TV news. I just don't watch it, and neither do many people under 45. Like with cable TV, younger generations get their news on-demand and watch it where/when/how they please. One unfortunate side-effect of this convenience factor is that now people can curate their content more easily to reinforce their biases with self-contained echo chamber. That's why you have goobers praising Putin and convincing themselves utterly of completely nonsensical conspiracy theories.

Harper's first two years amounted to nothing. He erased nearly ten years of Liberal debt reductions by the end of his term. You and I can both agree on this. Trudeau's not a good steward of our public books and after his father's legacy I am not surprised by his behavior. Let's just not rewrite history and pretend that Harper did a good job either. He spent a lot of money to prop up his minority governments that he didn't need to. His tax policy was bad (virtually every economist would agree that income tax reductions would have been more helpful than GST/PST and he did not leave things better off than when he started.

Justin's made a fool out of himself internationally on virtually every stage. You don't have to convince me that's not the case. Him showing up with his family in India wearing cringe Bollywood costumes would be like Narendra Modi visiting Canada in lumberjack-wear complete with coontail courer-de-bois hat. The guy's a complete joke. That the clowntown fringe of the EU's two-bit nations are criticizing him isn't in the least bit remarkable . Who the hell cares what some bald and fat mouth-breather from Romania says, or what the illustrious representatives from Croatia or Finland's right wing say while they're trying to score cheap points back home? Nobody. Canada's reputation around the world is fine, Justin's embarrassing performances aside. He's not taken seriously and is considered a lightweight, but to think our international reputation is in shambles over the Freedumb Convoy or his frequent cringe-inducing moments forgets how unremarkable he is compared to Donald Trump and his carnival of foreign relations disaster.

I don't know anything about that.

and on the flip side you have a bunch of angry losers trawling the fringe-web for retarded conspiracy news they can yell about and repeat to everyone. Say whatever you want about the old boomers, but at least they're grounded in reality, regardless of how much CNN crap they're slurping.

We have language, and some people are good at communicating reasonably like adults. Others never learn to get over their adolescent tantrums and figure that ANGRY EMPHATIC LANGUAGE substitutes for proper reasoning. Trudeau's spanking in Europe was a nothing-burger. These weren't notable European politicians, they were two-bit back-seaters trying to score points at home and the freedumb convoy was a visible part of the day's news cycle. I don't, but I also don't buy into your wild exaggerations and dumb conspiracy theories. Believe it or not it's possible to agree with you on some things without buying into all of your raving nonsense.

Yet they're the only party in the last 30 years that has. They were also the primary cause of our ballooning deficit in the late 70's and early 80's to begin with, so it's not so easy to throw labels around. It's almost like this is a nuanced issue that requires thoughtful consideration rather than angry black-and-white party politics. That's fine, but you can't offer up the financial crisis as an excuse for Harper and then highlight the Trudeau Liberal deficits during the COVID-19 global lockdowns, which were orders of magnitude more damaging than anything Harper had to deal with. Why don't you provide the citation for that and maybe we can discuss it? No offense but I'm not really too confident in the off-hand numbers you provide here. At any rate, there's no arguing that Justin hasn't gone off the deep end and that coming out of COVID-19 he's not going to blow a hole in the bottom of our hull. It looks like we're getting deep deficits to support social programs and that's always a recipe for disaster.

Sure it is, because they took a balanced budget with large surpluses and erased 10 years of progress the Liberals made paying down the debt in ~3 years by diving deep into debt to support their minority governments. Going back to Harper, let's look at his ACTUAL deficit record, rather than the make-believe you're playing here. Harper ran massive deficits from 2008-2014 (~$137B worth) and spent like a drunken sailor throughout. He had the financial crisis to contend with but that wasn't anywhere near the COVID-19 crisis in scale or impact. The COVID-19 lockdowns were unprecedented and would have hobbled any government. That being said, there's no doubt that Trudeau's abandoned any pretense of fiscal conservatism and we're headed for pain. That he's mismanaging Canada's finance is no surprise given his father's appalling legacy. Let's just not pretend that Harper was a good steward of the federal books. He left us with big, fat debts and the transition from him to Trudeau has just been from bad to worse.

Sure, but who cares? He's probably a scumbag and whether he was addicted to pain killers or not doesn't really change that. I'm not sure what "conspiracy" theory you're thinking is coming true here. It's like every time something shady happens, you'll try and connect it to the Trudeau government or the WEF. I cheated on a chemistry test in grade 12. Klaus Schwab gave me the answers ahead of time...?

Nobody but old boomers watch TV news anymore (no offense folks! ?), and even then it's not like you can go back and prove whether they reported these issues there.