Check It Out: Hindsight is 20/20
By Joan Janzen
joanjanzen@yahoo.com
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who thought he was helping the south. One hundred and fifty-five years later an exam question read: “Suppose you lived during the time of Abraham Lincoln. What would you say to him?” The student answered: “I’d tell him not to go to the theatre, ever.”
Both that student and MP Pierre Poilievre would agree that hindsight is 20/20. Poilievre said, “Governments are printing more money than ever. There’s a long history of governments printing money to pay for their spending and it never ends well. We need real economic output rather than just money creation.” Poilievre is the incoming Shadow Minister for Jobs and Industry.
Poilievre stressed the seriousness of the situation. “Canada has $3.87 of debt for every $1.00 of economic output. The only thing that is saving us right now is our interest rates are low.”
He explained that there are two ways to reduce our debt ratio before rates rise: frugality and industry. “One is to grow our economy and the other is to contain our debt. We need to contain our expenditures while we expand our income through industry,” he explained, adding that right now we are hampered by low levels of investment.
When he was asked how we bring investment back to Canada, he said an unexpected positive opportunity came as a result of Covid. Because people were not able to spend money during the lock down, they were able to save. Reports show $170 billion of cash savings ... $90 billion by households and $80 billion by businesses.
He noted the Finance Minister says she considers these savings as stimulus to use as consumer spending. Poilievre rationalized, “Spending these savings will create short term activity, but it will leave no lasting economic asset that will go on producing income, to feed our families, to fund schools and hospitals.”
Rather he suggested, “We need that money to convert into income producing investments ... factories, software, patents, things that produce income. We need to unleash the power of our free enterprise system so our businesses can make more, produce more and pay more wages. There’s one solution to a debt crisis: pay cheques. It’s simple but not easy.”
He also had suggestions how it can be done. One was to make Canada the fastest place on earth to get a building permit. “That would unleash our construction sector, our steel sector, our energy sector.”
Poilievre noted our tax and benefit system needs to be reformed so it will reward, not punish work. “Workers currently get a penalty for the crime of earning themselves a pay cheque,” he explained.
“Government should fast track decisions on $40 billion dollars worth of projects,” he said, referring to the Teck Frontier Mine in northern Alberta, the $14 billion LNG Canada gas plant where BC private sector LNG Canada liquifies billions of cubic feet of natural gas.
He stressed the importance of the energy sector, since it’s predicted 60 - 100 million barrels of oil will be consumed every day for the next several decades.
“We have clean green Canadian oil. We have the world’s only carbon negative oil company, White Cap Resources. It puts more carbon back into the ground where it came from than it puts in the air through its production of oil. Why aren’t we celebrating these environmental breakthroughs and unleashing the massive job and wealth potential that it brings rather than strangling the industry to death by blocking two pipelines? That is an outrage. Canada has the second biggest oil reserves on planet earth. We need to reverse those policies.”
In conclusion he summarized the solution he offered, “We need to slow the growth of government spending below the growth of the economy so the economy can catch up to the debt and progressively reduce it.”
Hindsight is 20/20 and shows there are solutions available, but is the government listening to them?