A pattern is emerging.
When Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre released his first 15 minute long documentary – Housing Hell – the Liberals scrambled for a response.
They didn’t find a good one.
Deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland tried Tweeting out a link to some worthless Liberal housing promises, and said it was a “real plan” on housing.
Unfortunately for her, she had quote Tweeted Poilievre’s Housing Hell documentary, which made her Tweet look like and endorsement of his plan. The Tweet was deleted of course, but not before it was subject to widespread ridicule.
In response to Poilievre’s latest documentary – ‘Debtonation’ Part 1 – Freeland responded yet again. And yet again, she flubbed it.
While the flub wasn’t quite as embarrassing this time, it was nonetheless a hilariously bad response:
Poilievre’s Conservatives continue to show, vote after vote, video after video, they stand for reckless cuts & austerity.
Our responsible economic plan allows us to make crucial investments in Canadians backed by a AAA credit rating and the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7. pic.twitter.com/EJtSLxO1KX
— Chrystia Freeland (@cafreeland) December 27, 2023
First, Canada’s debt position is far worse than Freeland claims. The Liberals love to talk about “net debt,” because this allows them to use the financial assets of the CPP and QPP to make our debt position look better, even though those assets couldn’t be used by the government to pay off debt.
The Fraser Institute explained this well, noting Canada’s gross debt is significantly worse than many of our peers:
“So, a better measure of Canada’s comparative indebtedness is to compare “gross general government debt” to GDP. Gross debt, according to the IMF, includes “all liabilities that require future payment of interest and/or principal by the debtor to the creditor” while general government includes all levels of government.
Using this measure, Canada falls from 11th among 29 OECD countries when net debt is measured to 20th. Our nine-position decline in the ranking is the second-largest change of any country (behind only Finland, which falls 16 places). Even worse, our gross debt is equal to 111 per cent of our GDP, which isn’t good by anyone’s standards.”
Freeland’s sneaky dismissal of Canada’s debt problem isn’t even the biggest error in her response.
By focusing on the government, she ignores the debt crisis facing individual Canadians.
Canadians have the highest household debt burden in the G7. Debt servicing costs recently hit a record, and are still going up.
The more the Liberals take from Canadians through higher taxes, and the more their inflationary policies rob Canadians of our purchasing power, the more people have fallen further into debt in an attempt to maintain their standard of living.
And with our per capita GDP rapidly falling, Canadians are becoming poorer in real terms, which further adds to the burden of debt.
This is where Freeland’s real error is: Being completely tone-deaf, posting a meaningless chart in response to an in-depth 15-minute-long video about Canada’s growing debt crisis.
The Liberals simply have no answers for Canadians as more and more of the populace wakes up to how the Liberal government has deliberately sought to ruin our economy.
Spencer Fernando
