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Originally Posted by ThePrince
I also think it's misleading to justify the impact as minimal just because it's just a percent or two over budget, when in reality that money has to come from somewhere. It gets taken as debt that Canadian taxpayers have to pay for, and if you take the massive deficit projected deficit this year, Canada's debt servicing costs have essentially doubled in the last few years. So not sure why you are throwing stones about misleading when you are the one minimizing the impact of blowing through what was supposed to be a 'guardrail'.
I understand that much of the spending over the past few years had to happen to keep things afloat when the pandemic hit, but it's not a pandemic anymore, and we're still piling on enormous deficits. With how much Canada's economy has dragged, you can't afford to continually pile on debt. Debt is a great lever when you have a growing economy (ie. the USA). Debt is a killer when your economy is shrinking (ie. Canada). And in terms of the real GDP growth rate of the economy, Canada ranks dead last in the G7 since 2015. People can spout that absolute real GDP isn't bad when you look at G7 countries, but it's the trends that matter, and the trends are grim for Canada.
With investment being a global game now, there is no investment thesis for Canada anymore. Why in the world would the marginal investment dollar go to Canada when investors can put their money into the US with more stability and higher growth potential, or they can invest in emerging markets for riskier high growth opportunities?
You're already seeing that with how much the US dollar has continued to strengthen and the Canadian dollar hitting a low today (since 2020). Maybe that changes with Trump in power, but looking at what the markets have done since Trump won the election, that's not the bet anyone is making right now, and in fact, it's gone the other way with the US dollar strengthening even more and the Canadian dollar weakening.
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I agree our deficits are far too large and that competitiveness will be important going forward. That’s where the criticism should lie. The problem isn’t that due to one time costs the deficit target was exceeded by 50 PERCENT. It’s that our government deficit is 10% of its total spending.
So when people complain the FES was a disaster I don’t think they were paying attention. Nothing new was learned My argument isn’t that we are in good shape. It’s there is an over reaction to this particular news as it didn’t materially change anything about this government.