Justin Trudeau Liberals Are Going To Spend More Money To Curb Inflation…

Recently, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled the Liberals’ plans to curb inflation in Canada, but one obvious issue with what was presented was that it all supposedly requires a lot more government spending in order to “make life more affordable.” 

On the PMO’s website, they list these three initiatives to make life more affordable:

• Double the Goods and Services Tax Credit (GSTC) for six months

• Provide a Canada Dental Benefit to children under 12 who do not have access to dental insurance

• Provide a one-time top-up to the Canada Housing Benefit to deliver $500 to 1.8 million Canadian renters

Even the first item on the list that sounds like it is a reimbursement for taxes paid is not at all that, and simply a transfer payment to people living below a certain level of income to the tune of a few hundred dollars for the average recipient. At the very least this point of the Liberals’ plan is targetted at lower-income Canadians, and, in theory, can be paid for with sales tax revenue, although its highly-unlikely the Liberals are not going to cut any spending to accommodate the doubling of these benefits.

The Liberals’ plan to provide benefits for children under 12 who aren’t covered by dental insurance sounds like it is a targeting program to help improve dental care, but it’s just another redistribution program. The program uses children under 12 without dental insurance simply as a metric to direct $1,300 to families for each child without dental insurance, over the next two years. (Families with incomes up to $90,000 can take advantage of this program) 

The final point listed on the PMO website is simply a program to make one-time $500 payments to 1.8 million Canadian renters.

Of course, all of these ideas will simply make living in Canada less affordable. Although redistributing cash from taxpayers to specific subsects of Canadians will help those specific people make payments in the short term, this is only making life less affordable in the long run.

All of this spending is either going to require the federal government to print more money or go deeper into debt, making prices rise over time, likely justifying more redistributionist policies in the mind of Justin Trudeau and his Liberal cabinet.

If Trudeau or the Liberals were actually concerned with making life more affordable, and in a way sustainable in the long run, they would be trying to cut spending, stop printing more money, and reduce marketing distorting taxes and regulations.

They aren’t doing any of those things, and it likely isn’t because Trudeau or Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland are economically illiterate, as much as they value the expansion of government power over actually fixing Canada’s economy and monetary policy. They have a Conservative opposition urging them to make the economically sensible moves, and yet they belittle or ignore all the advice.