Did you know that since the Trudeau Liberals came to office in 2015 the cost of taxpayer-funded health care for asylum seekers has risen by 585%? Or that federal spending on Indigenous programs has tripled, yet living standards on reserves have barely budged?
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Did you know that the payroll for federal executives has doubled? Or that because the national debt has also doubled, the average family is paying $100 a month in taxes just to cover the interest payments?
Those four examples, all just from this week, confirm that the Liberals are very good at making government bigger and more expensive. What they’re not so good at, is making government better.
The Harper government slashed health-care funding to asylum seekers. Upon their return to government nearly nine years ago, the Liberals restored generous benefits, many of which exceed the benefits ordinary, working Canadians could afford for themselves and their families.
In a story Friday on the CBC, it was explained that the original cost for health care for refugee claimants was $60 million a year in 2016. By 2019, that figure had doubled to $125 million, and this year will exceed $411 million.
Some of the reasons for the huge increase are that the Liberals are allowing into Canada so many tens of thousands more refugees a year; the number jacks up the price.
But also, the numbers delay the evaluation of claims for asylum. Once federal adjudicators declare someone a refugee, that person becomes a permanent resident and moves over to their respective provincial health-care system. But the Libs have let in so many asylum seekers, getting a determination is taking longer and longer. During these delays, claimants remain longer on the federal tab.
Another major escalator of the cost, though, is the generous array of federal health benefits given to refugees: “Primary care, hospital visits, lab tests, ambulance services, vision and dental care, home care, long-term care, psychologists, hearing aids, oxygen equipment and prescription drugs,” according to the program’s own information.
There’s a similar dynamic with the payroll for federal civil servants. The federal payroll overall for all levels of civil servants has increased 70% under the Liberals. Executive pay, however, has increased nearly 100%. That’s because the Liberals are paying them better, but also because they have gone on an executive hiring binge.
Parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux earlier this year revealed that the average civil service agency or department has seven layers of managers and executives. It’s no wonder nothing gets done between civil servants working from home and decisions pinballing up and down the management chain.
For years, the Trudeau government has resisted publishing a “sunshine list” showing every federal employee making over $100,000 or $150,000 or more. I’d always thought that was to keep from admitting how wasteful payroll spending has become. But now I’m guessing it’s because the list would be the size of a medium-sized city’s phonebook (when there used to be phonebooks).
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Also this week, according to Vancouver’s Fraser Institute, federal spending on Indigenous programs has risen from $11 billion to $32 billion under the Liberals, which works out to about $29,000 per registered Indigenous or Inuit Canadian.
Yet, according to the Community Well-Being Index, during the past nine years the standard of living for First Nations people has only risen from a score of 58.4 to 62.4.
The problem is clearly not a lack of money.
Finally, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, all this spending (of borrowed money) has led to a deficit so large that the average Canadian family’s taxes include about $1,200 a year just for debt-servicing costs.
That’s a lot of examples from just one week of how incompetent the current federal government is.