Economy
High food costs causing some Canadians to feel ‘hopeless’ and ‘desperate’: gov’t report
From LifeSiteNews
The Department of Social Development stated in a recent briefing note that the nation’s poverty rate could increase by 14% this year due to high food prices.
The Canadian government’s own National Advisory Council on Poverty (NACP) observed in a recent update to the nation’s Parliament that fast-rising food costs in Canada have led to many people feeling a sense of “hopelessness and desperation” with nowhere to turn for help.
As noted by Blacklock’s Reporter, NACP stated last week in a report to Parliament that its coming 2024 spring figures regarding the poverty rate in Canada show it standing at 9.8%, affecting some four million Canadians, compared with a low of 6.4 in 2020.
“We noted a growing sense of hopelessness and desperation,” the NACP said in its report titled Blueprint for Transformation.
NACP observed how persons with lived “expertise of poverty and service providers alike told us things seem worse now than they were before and during the first years of the pandemic.”
“We heard that people are worried about the rising cost of living and inflation,” the report added.
According to the NACP report, more people are in “crisis and these crises are more visible in our communities.”
NACP said that recent increases in cost of living “represent one of the most important socioeconomic challenges faced by people living in Canada following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
High living costs in Canada will “put upward pressure on poverty rates,” the NACP said.
NACP observed that in speaking with people, it seems as “though the feelings of hopefulness and optimism for change that we saw early in the pandemic have faded.”
“Hopelessness and desperation have replaced these as the cost of living continues to increase,” NACP documented.
Food costs are going up so fast that even Canada’s own Department of Social Development in a recent briefing note stated that the nation’s poverty rate could increase by 14% this year due to high food prices.
Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, due to excessive COVID money printing, inflation has skyrocketed.
A report from September 5, 2023, by Statistics Canada shows food prices are rising faster than headline inflation at a rate of between 10% and 18% per year.
According to a recent Statistics Canada supermarket survey of prices, Canadians are now paying 12% more for carrots, 14% more for hamburger (ground meat), and some 27% more for baby formula.
“Chronic issues are becoming more acute,” the Council on Poverty wrote. “These include inadequate income, unmet housing needs and houselessness, food insecurity and worsening physical and mental health.”
NACP noted that although poverty rates fell between 2015 and 2020, these declines were not “sustained” and the rates will now “increase even further.”
Trudeau’s carbon tax adds to high inflation and food costs and should be ‘scrapped’
Last year, the Bank of Canada acknowledged that Trudeau’s federal “climate change” programs, which have been deemed “extreme” by some provincial leaders, are indeed helping to fuel inflation.
Franco Terrazzano, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, told LifeSiteNews that Trudeau should “completely scrap his carbon tax,” as it is making everything more expensive.
Terrazzano said at the “very least” Trudeau should “extend the same relief he provided to Atlantic Canadians and take the carbon tax off everyone’s home heating bill.”
In October, amid dismal polling numbers that showed his government would be defeated in a landslide by the Conservative Party come the next election, Trudeau announced he was pausing the collection of the carbon tax on home heating oil in Atlantic Canadian provinces for three years.
LifeSiteNews has earlier reported on Trudeau’s carbon tax costing Canadians hundreds of dollars annually, as government rebates it gives out are not enough to compensate for high fuel costs.
A report by four Canadian universities in December showed that an average family of four will spend approximately $16,297 on groceries in 2024.
From the Fraser Institute
By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro
In yet another high-stakes maneuver in the fall session of Parliament, the Bloc Québécois recently tabled a motion urging the Trudeau government to support Bill C-319, which would increase Old Age Security (OAS) payments for seniors aged 65 to 74 by 10 per cent. The motion passed and the Bloc is threatening to trigger an election if the Trudeau government doesn’t give the bill final approval before October 29.
Meanwhile, according to a new poll, 79 per cent of Canadians “support or somewhat support” the OAS increase. But crucially, the poll provided no information to respondents about the costs associated with expanding OAS, even though Canadians should understand the costs before they pledge support for any government program.
Consider this—according to past polling, more than two-thirds of Canadians expressed support for the Trudeau government’s national dental care, $10-a-day daycare, and pharmacare programs. Yet once respondents were made aware of potential tax increases (specifically, increases to the GST), support plummeted to less than 50 per cent for all three programs.
Clearly, support for government programs can change dramatically once Canadians understand the costs since they ultimately must pay those costs. So, that being said, what are the costs of a 10 per cent increase in OAS payments for seniors aged 65 to 74?
According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux, the policy would cost more than $3 billion a year, with a five-year price tag of $16.1 billion—a “significant chunk of change” in his words.
Based on its latest budget, the Trudeau government expects to run deficits of at least $20.0 billion for the next five years and rack up more than $400 billion in new debt by 2028/29. If the government borrows more money to pay for increased OAS benefits, that debt number will grow even larger.
And again, Canadians will ultimately bear the costs of an expanded OAS through higher taxes in the future because Canadians must pay interest on government debt. This fiscal year (2024/25) federal debt interest costs are already expected to reach $54.1 billion—which is equal to the entire amount raised by the GST. These are taxpayer dollars that won’t go towards any services or programs for Canadians, and interest costs will continue to grow as the government adds more and more debt.
Finally, in addition to being costly, the plan is poorly targeted. While some programs such as the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) provide additional income support to low-income seniors, OAS provides support to many upper middle-income seniors. Indeed, based on current thresholds, individual seniors (aged 65 to 74) earning up to $148,451 per year are eligible to receive OAS (though seniors earning more than $90,997 of income don’t receive the full amount). Therefore, if Bill C-319 becomes law, a senior couple with a combined household income of nearly $300,000 will receive an increase in their OAS payments.
Increasing OAS payments will cost billions each year while supplementing the income of many seniors who aren’t in need. Despite the political theatre in Ottawa, Canadians are ultimately the ones who will foot the bill.
Authors:
It turns out we move a great deal less than our American neighbors
Government policies have consequences. Among them is the possibility that they might so annoy the locals that people actually get up and head for the exit. Given how parting can be such sweet sorrow (and how it’s a pain to lose out on all that revenue from provincial income, property, and sales tax), legislatures generally prefer to keep their citizens on this side of the door.
Nevertheless, migration happens. And when enough people do it at the same time, they sometimes leave economic and social clues behind waiting to be discovered. This graph represents net migrations since 1971 into and out of the four largest provinces:
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It may just be possible to make out some broad patterns here. Quebec has never had a net inbound migration year (although there’s been plenty of immigration to Quebec from outside of Canada). But nothing matches the mass exodus of anglophones due to concerns over language and separation in the 1970s.
Curiously it seems that Alberta and British Columbia received far more migrants than Ontario around that time – although the actual numbers tell us that they were more likely to have come from Saskatchewan and Ontario than Quebec. By contrast, most disillusioned Quebecers found their way to Ontario. Besides the 70s, Alberta also enjoyed inbound spikes in the mid-90s, mid-00s, and early 10s. And it looks like they’re in the middle of another boom cycle as we speak.
The real value of all this data however, is in using it to test causation hypotheses. In other words, can statistical analysis tell us what it was that caused the migrations? And are some or all of those causes the result of government policy choices? Here are some possibilities we’ll explore:
- Household income trends
- Government debt
- Crime rates
- Healthcare costs
- Housing costs
Right off the top I’ll come clean with you: there’ll be no smoking gun here. I could find no single historical measure that came close to explaining migration patterns. However I was able to confidently discard some theories. That’s a win I guess. And other numbers did hint to intriguing possibilities.
Inter-provincial variations in household income, crime rates (specifically murder rates), healthcare costs (including prescriptions, eye care, and dental care), and even housing affordability had no measurable impact on migration. This was true for both correlation coefficients and lag analysis (where we looked at migration changes in the years following an economic event).
Rising unemployment had, at best, a minimal impact on outbound migration. And even then, it was only noticeable for Alberta and Prince Edward Island.
Of all the metrics I explored, the only one that might have had a serious influence in migration was provincial government budget deficits.
Folks from Alberta, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland all responded to growing government debt by clearing out. Now, I doubt this was their way to telling the government what they really thought about bad fiscal management. Rather, people probably decided to move to greener pastures in response to the ripple-effect consequences of deficits, like higher taxes, reduced social services, and deteriorating infrastructure.
I suspect that part of the reason I wasn’t able to find any strong connections between those metrics and migration patterns is because there really isn’t all that much migration going on in the first place.
Take Ontario’s record net population loss of 31,018 residents back in 2021. That may sound like a lot of people, but it’s actually just a hair over two-tenths of one percent of the total Ontario population. And even Quebec’s epic 1979 loss of 46,429 people was still nowhere near one percent. It was 0.7117456, to be precise. Those aren’t significant numbers.
When so few people choose to move, it’s probably because there’s nothing on the macro level going on that’s pushing them. Those who do go, probably do it primarily for personal reasons that just won’t show up in population-scale data.
There’s also the very real possibility that Canadians are smart enough to realize that things probably won’t be any better over there than they already are right here. Fewer than two-thirds of one percent of Ontarians left for other provinces in 2023, while only around one-third of a percent gave up on Quebec.
By contrast, annual state-to-state migration figures in the U.S. typically range between 1 percent to 5 percent of each state’s population. In 2022, that added up to 8.2 million people, according to the Census Bureau.
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