When
I was sixteen, a day of skiing cost about twenty-five
bucks. This covered the bus ride to the hill, lift ticket,
rentals, hotdog and a fountain pop. Today—according
to my mathematical calculations—a ski day is financially
out of reach for roughly 99.5 percent of anyone between
16 and 40. It’s not just that younger generations
can’t afford to ski, they can’t afford the
drugs that would delude them into thinking they could
afford it.
Once
upon a time, Canada’s middle class was the envy
of the world. Then, a decade of neoliberal globalist policies
reduced us to the level of the europoors, minus benefits
like generous paid leave and subsidized rail travel.
What
the media calls an “affordability” crisis
is more like an affordability sinkhole. On certain days,
it feels dystopian. Suddenly, the asphalt gave way, and
we found ourselves staring up from the bottom of a smoking
crater, in a trance-like state of shock. It’s the
look you see at the supermarket checkout, where shoppers
stare hollow-eyed at their grocery bills, asking themselves.
Holy Mother of God. When did potatoes become a buck a
piece?
The
sticker shock on everything pummels us from so many directions
it’s hard to know where to look. One obvious place
is our larcenous rate of taxation. We are taxed on what
we earn, spend, save, invest and inherit; taxed on our
luxuries and sins; taxed to register, drive and fill up
our cars, then taxed to drive on roads our taxes already
paid to build. Buy a house? Tax. Sell it? Maybe tax. Die?
You guessed it.
The
federal carbon levy—a tax on everything—is
subject to HST on the total bill. A tax… taxed,
which is like tipping your waiter, then tipping the tip.
Alcohol and gas are both subject to a stack of levies,
duties, markups and taxes one on top of the other, which
all compound into the retail price. We buy it with our
pre-taxed money. They tax us on used cars, which were
already subject to a tax.
Our
taxes fund schemes on how to tax us more. Like paying
lobby group Generation Squeeze $250,000 for a study on
a home equity tax, plus an additional $200,000 to warm
us up to the idea through paid media.
Our
lowest tax jurisdiction has higher taxes than America’s
highest tax jurisdiction. We have one CRA bureaucrat for
every 700 citizens. In the US, there is one IRS bureaucrat
for every 4,000 citizens.
The
ruling class sermonizes about affordability, but tax relief
is never on the table, like the Tim Robinson Wienermobile
meme when he crashes through a shop window, loudly insisting
that “we’re all trying to find the guy who
did this!”
Instead, our bureaucratic apparatus treats tax revenues
like a coke head treats the ATM at midnight on a Friday.
The government’s negative balance (+$1.3 trillion)
is immaterial, since there’s a ginormous overdraft
known as ‘printing more money,’ the equivalent
of the cokehead tapping into his credit cards.
The
eerie, unsettling part is that Ottawa gives away billions
of dollars we don’t have to other countries—and
for dubious reasons—while pretending this is perfectly
normal. There are way too many audacious items to list
here, so I’ll give you a short list of lowlights:
we sent $44 million to Luxembourg for a climate initiative,
$10 million to the UK for abortion services and, my personal
favourite, $20 million to Ghana to teach the locals not
to shit on the beach.
When it’s not sending vast sums abroad, the government
immolates huge piles of cash here at home. It threw away
nearly $800 million on a gun buyback program that doesn’t
exist. One quarter of the +$350 billion Covid budget vanished
into a black hole, according to the Fraser Institute.
Then there’s the $100 billion EV strategy, more
or less abandoned, and $200 million just to administer
the carbon tax. All of it unfolding while China builds
two new coal plants a week.
All
this would go down easier if the astonishing levels of
spending yielded miraculous things, like high-speed trains
or state-of-the-art healthcare centres or new, world-class
universities.
Narrator:
“The spending has not yielded miraculous things.”
In
2025, Justin Trudeau proposed a high-speed rail line from
Toronto to Quebec City. Between the staggering costs,
public skepticism, and the small detail that nine years
of planning had already gone nowhere, the idea landed
as a punchline. Let’s check in on healthcare.
Need an MRI today? Best we can do is kill you. Now that
is dystopian. And it’s definitely not something
we hear about in mainstream media. Nor do we see the full
picture of Ottawa’s dizzying cycle of scandals,
spending and taxation. Because our government buys cover
from legacy media, funding the CBC to the tune of a billion-plus
dollars, while sprinkling a few hundred million to private
legacy platforms. Why bite the hand that feeds you?
And
legacy media is where Baby Boomers—the single most
influential voting bloc—get their news. They’re
hooked up to a steady drip of state-approved information,
rather like the soma in Brave New World, gently convinced
that the real danger isn’t the cost of living but
Donald Trump.
So
we can’t vote our way out. And we’re certainly
not shooting our way out. Please! This is Canada—no
flaming barricades or storming of the Bastille. We’re
too civically house-trained to make a scene. So we carry
on as usual, dimly aware that something vital is being
siphoned off, knowing we’re upstream of a machine
that never fills.
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