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Federal debt interest will consume nearly one quarter of income tax revenue in 2024

Published

1 year ago

5 minute read

From the Fraser Institute

By Grady Munro and Jake Fuss

The Trudeau government will table its next budget on April 16. In recent years, the government has overseen a substantial rise in the amount of interest it must pay to service federal debt, reversing a long-standing trend of interest costs declining relative to personal income tax revenues. By 2024/25, according to projections, nearly one in four dollars of personal income tax revenue will go towards debt interest.

Just like how individuals must pay interest when they take out a mortgage, the government must also pay interest when it borrows money. These interest payments represent taxpayer dollars that don’t go towards programs or services for Canadians.

When interest costs rise faster than the government’s ability to pay—i.e. the revenues it brings in—the government will face pressure to take on more debt to maintain funding for programs and services. And by taking on more debt, this places additional upward pressure on interest costs (all else equal) and the cycle repeats.

A useful way to track this is to measure debt interest costs as a share of federal personal income tax (PIT) revenues, which represent Ottawa’s single-most important revenue source. In 2024/25, they’re expected to comprise just under half (46.4 per cent) of total revenues and therefore provide a useful gauge of the government’s ability to pay interest on its debt. As such, the chart below includes projections for federal debt interest costs as a share of PIT revenues for the two decades from 2004/05 to 2024/25.

Chart

As we can see from the chart, for many years federal debt interest costs had been declining as a share of Personal Income Tax revenues. In 2004/05, 34.6 per cent of PIT revenues went towards servicing federal debt, but by 2015/16 that share had fallen to 15.1 per cent. In other words, during the Trudeau government’s first year in office, federal interest costs consumed less than one in six dollars of personal income tax revenue paid by Canadians. Interest costs as a share of PIT revenues continued to fall for the next several years, down to a low of 11.7 per cent in 2020/21. However, this marked the end of the decline, and the years since have seen rapid growth in debt interest costs that far exceeds growth in PIT revenues.

In the two years from 2020/21 to 2022/23, federal interest payments rose from 11.7 per cent of PIT revenues to 16.8 per cent. And by the end of the upcoming fiscal year in 2024/25, debt interest payments will reach a projected 23.4 per cent of PIT revenues. In four years, debt interest payments are expected to have gone from consuming about one in nine dollars of PIT revenue to nearly one in four dollars. Put differently, nearly one quarter of the money taxpayers send to Ottawa in the form of personal income taxes will not go towards any programs or services in 2024/25.

The causes of this sudden rise in interest costs as a share of PIT revenues are the combined effects of a substantial accumulation of debt under the Trudeau government, and a recent rise in interest rates. From 2015/16 to 2022/23, the Trudeau government added $820.7 billion in gross federal debt, and by 2024/25 total debt will reach a projected $2.1 trillion—roughly double the amount inherited by the current government. Meanwhile, from 2022 to 2023, the Bank of Canada increased its policy interest rate from a low of 0.25 per cent to the current rate of 5.00 per cent.

Simply put, federal debt interest costs have risen and are expected to eat up almost one quarter of federal PIT revenues by 2024/25. To help prevent taxpayers from devoting an even larger share of their tax dollars towards debt interest, the Trudeau government should cease its heavy reliance on borrowing in this year’s federal budget.

Authors:

Grady Munro
Jake Fuss
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Canada has made a legal commitment to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. Back in 2015, then-Prime Minister Trudeau promised that climate action will “create jobs and economic growth” and the federal government insists it will create a “strong economy.” The truth is that the net zero policy generates vast costs and very little benefit—and Canada would be better off changing direction.

Achieving net zero carbon emissions is far more daunting than politicians have ever admitted. Canada is nowhere near on track. Annual Canadian CO₂ emissions have increased 20 per cent since 1990. In the time that Trudeau was prime minister, fossil fuel energy supply actually increased over 11 per cent. Similarly, the share of fossil fuels in Canada’s total energy supply (not just electricity) increased from 75 per cent in 2015 to 77 per cent in 2023.

Over the same period, the switch from coal to gas, and a tiny 0.4 percentage point increase in the energy from solar and wind, has reduced annual CO₂ emissions by less than three per cent. On that trend, getting to zero won’t take 25 years as the Liberal government promised, but more than 160 years. One study shows that the government’s current plan which won’t even reach net-zero will cost Canada a quarter of a million jobs, seven per cent lower GDP and wages on average $8,000 lower.

Globally, achieving net-zero will be even harder. Remember, Canada makes up about 1.5 per cent of global CO₂ emissions, and while Canada is already rich with plenty of energy, the world’s poor want much more energy.

In order to achieve global net-zero by 2050, by 2030 we would already need to achieve the equivalent of removing the combined emissions of China and the United States — every year. This is in the realm of science fiction.

The painful Covid lockdowns of 2020 only reduced global emissions by about six per cent. To achieve net zero, the UN points out that we would need to have doubled those reductions in 2021, tripled them in 2022, quadrupled them in 2023, and so on. This year they would need to be sextupled, and by 2030 increased 11-fold. So far, the world hasn’t even managed to start reducing global carbon emissions, which last year hit a new record.

Data from both the International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration give added cause for skepticism. Both organizations foresee the world getting more energy from renewables: an increase from today’s 16 per cent to between one-quarter to one-third of all primary energy by 2050. But that is far from a transition. On an optimistically linear trend, this means we’re a century or two away from achieving 100 percent renewables.

Politicians like to blithely suggest the shift away from fossil fuels isn’t unprecedented, because in the past we transitioned from wood to coal, from coal to oil, and from oil to gas. The truth is, humanity hasn’t made a real energy transition even once. Coal didn’t replace wood but mostly added to global energy, just like oil and gas have added further additional energy. As in the past, solar and wind are now mostly adding to our global energy output, rather than replacing fossil fuels.

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But net zero policies will be much more expensive. The best academic estimates show that over the century, policies to achieve net zero would cost every person on Earth the equivalent of more than CAD $4,000 every year. Of course, most people in poor countries cannot afford anywhere near this. If the cost falls solely on the rich world, the price-tag adds up to almost $30,000 (CAD) per person, per year, over the century.

Every year over the 21st century, costs would vastly outweigh benefits, and global costs would exceed benefits by over CAD 32 trillion each year.

We would see much higher transport costs, higher electricity costs, higher heating and cooling costs and — as businesses would also have to pay for all this — drastic increases in the price of food and all other necessities. Just one example: net-zero targets would likely increase gas costs some two-to-four times even by 2030, costing consumers up to $US52.6 trillion. All that makes it a policy that just doesn’t make sense—for Canada and for the world.

Bjørn Lomborg

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Media

CBC retracts false claims about residential schools after accusing Rebel News of ‘misinformation’

Published on April 22, 2025

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CBC has issued a correction after falsely accused Rebel News of spreading misinformation while itself promoting the false claim that remains of Indigenous children were found in unmarked graves at residential schools.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has issued a correction after blaming Rebel News of “misinformation” while spreading false information itself.

On April 17, CBC corrected a comment from chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton who accused Rebel News reporter Drea Humphrey of spreading “misinformation,” while repeating the false claim that bodies have been found in unmarked graves at Indigenous residential schools.

“Yes, there have been remains of Indigenous children found in various places across the country,” Barton falsely stated during a live broadcast following the French-language federal election leaders’ debate.

Her comment was in reference to New Democratic Leader (NDP) Jagmeet Singh refusing to answer a reporter’s question whether he would condemn the rash of church burnings and acts of vandalism across Canada.

“In this case you saw Mr. Singh, and this has been his position for some time, to refuse to answer questions,” Barton said during the live stream.

“Rebel News in particular traffics in misinformation, lack of facts, and as you heard in that question, which was woven with some truth and some things that weren’t true,” she claimed.

“Yes, there have been burnings of Christian, Catholic churches,” she admitted.

“Yes, there have been remains of Indigenous children found in various places around the country, which she misrepresented,” Barton falsely stated.

Despite mass excavations, there have still been no mass graves discovered at any residential schools across Canada, but politicians and media continue to promote the false narrative.

However, even in their correction statement, CBC failed to mention that, to date, no human remains have been discovered.

“As CBC News has reported on multiple occasions, what several Indigenous communities across Canada have discovered on the sites of some former residential schools are potential burial sites or unmarked graves,” the statement read.

However, CBC is now well known for pushing the false narrative that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools. As a consequence of that false narrative, since 2021, over 100 churches have been burned or vandalized across Canada in seeming retribution.

Indeed, in addition to perpetuating the “mass graves” narrative, media and politicians have even threatened to punish those who oppose it. In October 2024, CBC ran a story which suggested that “residential school denialism” should be criminalized.

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