Canada’s worst ever finance minister — Justin Trudeau #CanadaFinance

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Shock waves were sent through Ottawa on Monday, when Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland abruptly resigned hours before she was scheduled to deliver the fall economic statement, citing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s reckless spending and politically motivated tax “gimmicks.” But for all intents and purposes, little has changed — Trudeau has always effectively served as Canada’s finance minister, with whoever formally holds the title merely acting as a rubber stamp.

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Trudeau, funny enough, started out with slightly more fiscal sanity in his toolkit.

Indulge us, if you will, on a trip down memory lane. In the summer of 2015, Trudeau was campaigning on a pledge to run “a modest short-term deficit” of under $10 billion for the first three years of his mandate, and bringing it back to balance by 2019-20.

The Liberal platform featured what now seem like fairly centrist policies, including a Canada Child Benefit that would give parents the freedom to purchase the type of child care that worked best for them, given that, as the Liberals put it, “A one-size-fits all national program — particularly one that imposes pre-determined costs on other orders of government — is impractical and unfair.”

But like a kid in a candy store, once in office, Trudeau couldn’t help himself. His government’s first budget, tabled by Finance Minister Bill Morneau in 2016, projected a deficit that was nearly double Trudeau’s self-imposed $10-billion cap.

And Morneau didn’t even bother pretending he was going to balance the budget by the end of their first term — the 2016 budget estimated that by 2019-20, the government would still be running a $17.7-billion deficit. But back then, the country’s finances were still in pretty good shape, with the national debt sitting at a relatively quaint $620 billion.

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In the intervening years, we have witnessed one of the largest expansions of government in Canadian history. By 2021, the socialized daycare system the Liberals had decried as “impractical and unfair” became “essential social infrastructure” that would be brought into existence with seed funding of $30 billion over five years.

Other costly expansions into provincial areas of responsibility, such as socialized dental and pharmacare, were also pushed through, largely to placate the NDP once the Liberals lost their majority.

Continuing its trend of meddling in areas of provincial jurisdiction, the Trudeau government pushed through a constitutionally dubious carbon tax that the Supreme Court upheld as being in the national interest, but was made political when the Liberals exempted home heating oil used almost exclusively in the Atlantic provinces, where they were looking to shore up support.

Meanwhile, in Alberta, where the Liberal brand has been toxic since the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway scandal of 1910, the oil and gas sector was singled out with more stringent emissions caps than any other industry.

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In the name of saving the planet, Trudeau also engaged in a national industrial policy that would make Mussolini proud. Last year, the parliamentary budget officer estimated that the government’s support for the electric vehicle battery industry alone would cost $43.6 billion. Never mind that Canadians seem wholly uninterested in purchasing EVs — the Trudeau Liberals plan to force their hand by banning the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035.

A full accounting of this government’s wasteful spending and pork-barrel politics could be the subject of a tome that would make George R. R. Martin blush. But it speaks volumes that during his nine years in office, Trudeau lost both his finance ministers due to disagreements over his reckless, politically motivated spending.

Morneau stepped down in 2020 as the government engaged in a pandemic spending program that would double the national debt in a few short years. Actually, calling it a “program” is probably being too generous. The Liberals were simply spending vast sums of money in an effort to make it look as though they were doing something — anything — to try to mitigate the damage caused by the virus.

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As Morneau wrote in his 2023 book, “Where To From Here: A Path To Canadian Prosperity,” decisions were being made “on the fly” and “policy rationales were tossed aside in favour of scoring political points.” Morneau was expected to “rubber stamp” Trudeau’s political whims, even when they were made over the objections of finance officials.

“During the period when the largest government expenditures as a portion of GDP were made in the shortest time since the advent of World War II, calculations and recommendations from the Ministry of Finance were basically disregarded in favour of winning a popularity contest,” he wrote.

Rather than entering a period of fiscal austerity when the pandemic began to subside, the Liberals continued burning through cash, with Morneau’s replacement, Chrystia Freeland, arguing that low interest rates meant it would be “short-sighted of us not to.” But even she apparently had her limits. In her resignation letter, Freeland cited Trudeau’s Christmas-themed sales tax break and proposed rebate cheques as “costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford,” and walked away from a mini-budget that showed a $61.9-billion deficit and a national debt that exceeds $1.2 trillion.

Freeland refused to be a rubber stamp, so she was tossed aside in favour of Dominic LeBlanc, a close family friend of Trudeau’s who is sure to do the prime minister’s bidding for as long as he lasts in the job. Having a puppet in the finance portfolio has always been the goal of Justin Trudeau — a man who should go down in history as Canada’s worst ever finance minister.

National Post

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