Right in the centre - Canada is in a lot of trouble, a lot
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- Published on Friday, April 23, 2021
By Ken Waddell
Neepawa Banner & Press
The Winnipeg Sun summed up the new federal budget this way: “They’re planning to create a national day care program, increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour and throw billions of more dollars at pet ‘green’ projects, among other new gimmicks. We’re seeing the same attitude that led Trudeau to break his original promise of sticking to only ‘modest’ $10 billion deficits. Now we’re left with red ink as far as the eye can see.”
Some people may remember that then Prime Minister Stephen Harper rightly claimed that if the Liberals won the 2015 election, that there would be a huge deficit. He was right. Trudeau said it would only be about $10 billion. That was the “modest” he was referring to. Please remember that a billion dollars is 1,000 million dollars. Yes, one thousand million. The deficit for this year is predicted to be $3,542,000,000 billion.
Canada is in a lot of trouble, a lot.
The bigger problem is that, if an election were to be called soon, and it may well be, the opposition parties are in no position to take over. None of the parties have enough strength or leadership to take over. The Green Party is almost non-existent. The Bloc Quebecois are only in Quebec and have no intention of forming government. Their only goal is, and always has been is to extort the ROC (Rest of Canada) for as much as they can drag out of the other provinces (ie: Alberta, usually) and we all know that train is running on empty right now. Manitoba doesn’t help Quebec, as we, too, take more money from the pot than we put in.
The NDP still exist, but are a shadow of what they have been occasionally over the past 50 years. The fact that we can say “over the past 50 years” speaks volumes. The NDP have never really made a threat to become government and are as far from that now as they have ever been.
The Conservative Party of Canada has made moves to relegate themselves to opposition forever in recent months. First, they booted their basic voters to the gutter by not taking a stand on several very basic issues, so as to make an appeal to liberal voters. Leader Erin O’Toole, while a very nice man, looks like he is already too old for the job, while he is actually younger than Prime Minister Trudeau. And the last thing he and the CPC have done is drive into the ditch with a really stupid climate plan by claiming “their” carbon tax isn’t actually a tax. It’s a levy, a fund builder to be used for buying pretty electric cars and other such still useless stuff to get us on the road to climate change heaven.
Now, electric cars may be a good thing (some day), but the cost to build is still prohibitive. The cost of maintenance when you figure in new batteries after a few years is high. And, above all that, unless you can drive your electric car to and from Winnipeg from our area in one day, without a recharge, it’s a hopeless proposition.
Fortunately for Canada, regular people and the business community are doing the best they can to ignore all levels of government and go about the business of raising families, running business and actually getting a life in spite of the misplaced efforts of politicians.
•On the provincial side, there have been a number of questions about the rebates on education taxes. The government’s explanation can be found at: https://www.manitoba.ca/edupropertytax/
It appears that homeowners will receive up to $525 under the Education Property Tax Credit and 25 per cent off the education taxes. Of course, if the property doesn’t pay $525 in education tax, it will only get the amount up to the total paid. Once you throw in the farm tax rules and the seniors discount rules, it can be a bit confusing. It would be simpler if everyone was treated the same, regardless of income and then instead of government sending out cheques, the taxes could be reduced at the source and not have to have a bureaucracy to deal with rebates and applications. But that would be too simple.
