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TOP STORY
A purported video is circulating showing Stephen Harper telling a partisan crowd that all his warnings about Justin Trudeau had come true.
“Unfortunately, literally everything I said would happen in 2015 has now come to pass,” says the former prime minister at what appears to be a gathering in Windsor, Ont.
The 90-second video was posted to TikTok by Anil Thapa, a Windsor restaurant owner, broadcaster and Conservative nomination candidate.
The National Post was unable to verify the video’s authenticity either via Thapa directly or through Harper’s office.
But it’s not inconceivable that Thapa would have intimate access to a senior Conservative. Just last year, he conducted a one-on-one interview with Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre for his Nepali language FM station Namaste Radio Toronto.
And the statement is basically correct; during the 2015 election campaign Harper made a handful of specific predictions about what a Trudeau government would bring. Nine years later, all of them have indeed occurred.
At least twice during the 2015 campaign, Harper is on record as saying that Trudeau would blow out the federal debt at levels way past what the Liberal campaign was promising.
“If we’re going to be the kind of country that starts going into deficit even when the economy is growing … we know in the past that is a recipe for permanent deficits,” Harper said in an October 2015 interview with CBC host Rosemary Barton.
“Once you lose the anchor of a balanced budget, you’re always under pressure to just spend more and not cover it,” he said.
At the time, the Liberal pitch was that they would run “a modest short-term deficit” for their first three years, and then immediately return to a balanced budget by 2018. The final price tag of this spending was supposed to come in at a maximum of $30 billion in new federal debt.
This was something that Barton brought up in the interview, asking Harper how “three deficits” could ever end up becoming permanent deficits.
“They’re not three; nothing’s going to magically balance the budget after three years,” he replied.
Nine years after that interview, the federal debt has doubled. Debt stood at $616 billion when Trudeau took office in 2015, and just last month it passed $1.232 trillion.
The massive expenditures which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic are a big part of that, but not all.
In 2022, the Parliamentary Budget Officer calculated that more than a third of the deficit spending earmarked under COVID-19 had nothing to do with the pandemic. The Trudeau government approved $576 billion in new spending, of which $204.5 billion was “not part of the COVID-19 Response Plan.”
And even in the wake of the pandemic, the Trudeau government has continued to greenlight some of the largest peacetime budget deficits in Canadian history.
In 2021/2022, Canada racked up a deficit of $90.2 billion. Even adjusting for inflation, that’s larger than the $55.6 billion deficit that Harper ran up at the height of the 2008 Great Recession.
And in the last fiscal year (2023/2024), the federal deficit was still cruising at more than $40 billion per year — about $1,000 in new federal debt per Canadian.
The 2023 federal budget was also the first to discard any promise of eventually running a surplus. Instead, it pledged that deficits were on track to eventually reach “one per cent of GDP or lower.”
At a 2015 campaign stop in Hamilton, Ont., Harper also detailed his prediction that Trudeau’s pledge to go into deficit in the midst of a growing economy would quickly push Canada into uncharted fiscal territory.
“Trudeau’s deficits will not be small. Mr. Trudeau has made tens of billions of dollars of spending promises; he said the budget will balance itself, he has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to these things,” he said.
Although most of Harper’s most specific criticisms of Trudeau during the 2015 campaign were economic, there was also a moment during the 2015 leader’s debate in which the Conservative leader made an eerily accurate prediction of what immigration would look like under a Trudeau government.
At The Globe and Mail leader’s debate, both Trudeau and NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair were criticizing Harper for not having a sufficiently generous asylum policy in relation to refugees from the then-ongoing Syrian Civil War.
Gesturing to Trudeau and Mulcair, Harper said “these guys would have had, in the last two weeks, us throwing open our borders and literally hundreds of thousands of people coming without any kind of security check or documentation.”
Particularly in the last few years, Trudeau has indeed overseen an unprecedented spike in virtually all Canadian migration streams, which continues to bring in hundreds of thousands per year.
Security screening protocols of these newcomers have also been thrown in doubt by a number of incidents in which criminals or would-be terrorists have been able to enter Canada.
Most recently, this included Pakistani national Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, who entered Canada on a student visa and was arrested last month at the U.S. border and charged with a plot to slip into the United States to perpetrate a mass-shooting on a Jewish centre.
IN OTHER NEWS
The University Formerly Known as Ryerson has announced that its medical school will now be primarily approving applicants based on their race, rather than the traditional conduit of grades and ability. Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Medicine posted an update to its official selection guidelines stating that only about 24 of the 94 seats in the next MD program will be earmarked for candidates who qualify under conventional circumstances. The rest will be going to candidates who enter through “Indigenous, Black, and Equity-Deserving admissions pathways.” Although screening candidates based on their race is actually pretty common in Canadian universities these days, this is one of the more explicit examples.
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