FORSETH: How to take a perfectly good country and ruin it for everybody
Re-printed without permission this is so good it needs to be saved.
Paul Forseth
Published on:
12 Dec 2023, 7:30 am
Canada at the national level is in financial shambles.
The economic outlook for our young people is dismal and the dreams of new university graduates are dim for a viable economic future.
Food bank use is the highest in history and homeless camps are in every community. We hear stories about the historical Dirty 30s, but what about the present desperation of Generation X, Y, and Z; X born between 1965 and 1981, Y between 1982 and 1994, and Z born between 1995 and 2010?
We did it to ourselves by electing children to lead the country in 2015. We were warned by the Conservatives in the election campaign.
Trudeau lied about his plan for a temporary modest deficit, to fulfill some Liberal hobbyhorse policies. From the opposition, there was a clear warning that the likelihood would rather be uncontrolled disproportional deficit spending that would bring Canadians to ruin. Voters made their bad choices and now we all suffer.
Just as predicted.
Any new university student taking their first macro-economic course soon learns excessive deficit spending cannot be sustained and the consequence is always hurtful inflation. As money buys less, everyone gets a pay cut.
These students also learn the institutional response to an irresponsible spending government is higher interest rates, which slows investment and causes high unemployment.
These economic basics are well understood. Yet for ideological motives, the Liberals defied reality and spent more and broke the record for the highest level of spending in Canada’s history; the most money per person per year in Canadian history.
The Liberal government is on track to log the five highest years of per-person spending, even excluding COVID-19-specific spending. In 2020/21, the federal government spent $19,208 per Canadian — by far the largest amount in Canadian history. The next priciest year was 2021/22, at $13,571.
Even if COVID-19-related spending is excluded from the analysis, we still have the two highest per-person spending years in Canadian history.
Ultimately, the consequences of higher spending lead to higher deficits. These must be obtained with borrowed money, with its attendant associated killer interest payments. Canada can't just continue increasing per-person spending, without there being consequences for people. The NDP-Liberal coalition has hurt Canada.
The “spending like a drunken sailor” has given us a national migraine headache.
Therefore, the Bank of Canada will continue to respond with very unpleasant medicine. Canada is already economically stalled. There will never be a return to previous old low-level interest rates, which was not normal in any sense.
The previous artificial low rates were designed to prime the pump for slow economic times. But too much economic sugar and caffeine requires a distasteful medicine cure.
Bankruptcies are up significantly and business confidence remains low. Now is not a good time to expand. The private sector business community faces killer taxes and expensive regulation compliance; therefore Canada remains a chronic underachiever.
Our economy contracted by 1.06% quarter-over-quarter in the third quarter, while the US economy grew by 5.25%. The European Union and Australia also did better with modest economic growth.
We may not technically be in a full recession, but the picture is not good. The economy is not growing, despite the artificial injection of economic demand from immigration. The big picture is the Canadian economy is struggling to grow and barely managing to keep its head above the recession tidewater.
So, I make the point again: How does a country with so much potential, with a massive resource endowment and an educated and skilled population, end up lagging badly and living far below our potential?
The answer is simple. We did it to ourselves by electing children to lead the country in 2015.
On November 21, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland boasted "Canada is now a global investment destination of choice … and the IMF projects Canada to likewise see the strongest economic growth in the G7 next year."
But, it was the cold breath of political-speak. The most recent IMF projection is that US GDP will increase by 2.1% in 2023, but Canada's will only grow by 1.3%. Net foreign direct investment (FDI) plummeted throughout the Liberals’ administration.
According to figures from the World Population Review, last year the US led the world, with net FDI inflows of $388 billion, followed by China ($180 billion), Singapore ($141 billion), Hong Kong ($121 billion), France ($105 billion), Brazil ($92 billion), Australia ($67 billion) and Canada ($54 billion).
Canada’s economic prospects are not Liberal red rosy. Unwisely expanding the population and workforce through unprecedented immigration levels does temporarily increase the size of the economy (albeit in an unbalanced way) but the IMF observes it is not a formula for growing per capita income or the standard of living. The revealing measure is Canada has been falling, as prosperity on a per-person basis has been stagnant for years.
Canada’s investment climate also does not stack up to that of our competitors. The gross fixed capital formation (a broad measure of investment) puts Canada in the bottom 25% among the 38 countries that are members of the OECD.
To explain poor Canadian investment, the government has set the tone with restrictions and policy uncertainty that especially hurts the mining and energy sectors.
Since 2017, Canada has also lost its business tax advantage which has made Canada less attractive for investment. The international financial community views Canadian national, provincial and consumer debts as too high, making businesses and taxpayers vulnerable to high-interest rates. Even for a Christmas gesture, carbon tax relief could have been expanded as a mini-step towards fiscal sanity.
Canada appears less economically stable. We should be embarrassed.
In 2022, Canada's 'household debt, loans, and debt securities' as a proportion of the country's GDP was the highest in the G7. Canada’s indebtedness was equivalent to 102% of its GDP; the United Kingdom was 83%; the US was 74%; Japan 68%, France 66% and Germany 55%.
Another measure is Canada's excessive price-to-income ratio or the median price paid for property compared to average disposable income. In the middle of this year, Canada’s ratio was 9.6, which is more than double the US ratio of 4.2.
To pile it on, irresponsible government deficits, both federal and provincial, hobble the economy with debt service costs for generations to come. This was predicted in 2021 when the OECD said Canada would be the worst-performing economy for the next decade and three decades thereafter.
Are voters listening? These numbers matter to our lives.