National
Federal debt interest will consume nearly one quarter of income tax revenue in 2024
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.
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:
Alberta
Fortis et Liber: Alberta’s Future in the Canadian Federation
From the C2C Journal
By Barry Cooper, professor of political science, University of Calgary
Canada’s western lands, wrote one prominent academic, became provinces “in the Roman sense” – acquired possessions that, once vanquished, were there to be exploited. Laurentian Canada regarded the hinterlands as existing primarily to serve the interests of the heartland. And the current holders of office in Ottawa often behave as if the Constitution’s federal-provincial distribution of powers is at best advisory, if it needs to be acknowledged at all. Reviewing this history, Barry Cooper places Alberta’s widely criticized Sovereignty Act in the context of the Prairie provinces’ long struggle for due constitutional recognition and the political equality of their citizens. Canada is a federation, notes Cooper. Provinces do have rights. Constitutions do mean something. And when they are no longer working, they can be changed.
National
Trudeau again blames ‘climate change’ for mostly man-made wildfires
From LifeSiteNews
Trudeau and the media which his government funds appear intent on blaming Canada’s wildfires on ‘climate change’ in what seems to be an attempt to justify radical public policy.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberals are once again blaming Canadian wildfires on “climate change” despite most being man-made.
In a May 10 press release, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland lectured Canadians on the so-called dangers of “climate change” amid Canada’s wildfire season, apparently ignoring that data has revealed that most wildfires are man-made.
“Climate change is here, and we’re making sure our communities are ready,” Trudeau stated.
“Last year was the worst wildfire season in Canadian history, and climate change is only causing more frequent and more extreme wildfires,” Freeland claimed.
In addition to the Liberal government, mainstream media outlets have also started publishing articles attributing Canada’s wildfires to “climate change.”
“The seeds of fire activity were sown over the winter and in past years as the world continues to warm because of human-driven climate change,” CNN claimed in a May 15 article.
Despite the claims of the Trudeau government, the Alberta Wildfire Status Dashboard, which tracks wildfires in the province, found that 232 (72.96%) of the wildfires started this year have been linked to human activity. On the other hand, only 1 (0.31%) was caused by lightning, while 85 (26.73%) remain under investigation.
Last month, Alberta Minister of Forestry and Parks Todd Loewen revealed that his department estimates that most of the province’s wildfires this year are man-made.
Additionally, an April study revealed that while global temperatures have “moderately” increased since 1950, the claim that extreme weather events are significantly increasing is unsupported by scientific evidence.
Telling Canadians the same lies as in 2023
Indeed, Trudeau and the media his government funds appear intent on blaming Canada’s wildfires on “climate change” regardless of the facts, similar to their tactics in spring 2023 when Canada faced one of its worst fire seasons.
“Rise in extreme wildfires linked directly to emissions from oil companies in new study,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which gets 70 percent of its operating budget via tax dollars from the federal government, claimed at the time.
However, similar to now, Trudeau’s claims were unfounded and contradicted both research and wildfire data.
Indeed, despite claims that wildfires have drastically increased due to “climate change,” 2023 research revealed that wildfires have decreased globally while media coverage has spiked 400 percent.
Furthermore, many of the fires last spring and summer were discovered to be caused by arsonists and not “climate change.”
Last year, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) arrested and charged suspected arsonists for allegedly lighting fires across the country, including in the Yukon, British Columbia, and Alberta.
In Quebec, satellite footage also showed the mysterious simultaneous eruption of several blazes across the province, sparking concerns that the fires were a coordinated effort by arsonists.
Why push the ‘climate change’ narrative?
Trudeau’s determination to push the claim that the fires are unprecedentedly dangerous and caused by “climate change” appears by critics to be nothing but an attempt to pass further regulations on natural resources.
The Trudeau government has continued to insist on so-called net zero carbon policies, seeking a complete elimination of the fossil fuel industry in the future.
The reduction and eventual elimination of the use of so-called “fossil fuels” and a transition to unreliable “green” energy has also been pushed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) – the globalist group behind the socialist “Great Reset” agenda – an organization with which Trudeau and some in his cabinet are involved.
While Trudeau’s plan has been pushed under the guise of “sustainability,” his intention to decrease nitrous oxide emissions by limiting the use of fertilizer has been criticized by farmers. They say this will reduce profits and could even lead to food shortages.
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