(0:00 - 1:02) In just nine years, Justin Trudeau has doubled Canada's debt, while increasing taxes and leaving Canadians with nothing to show for it. Canada's debt clock stands at $1.2 trillion, and that debt grows by over $100 million every day. If you were born in 1975, your lifetime tax burden would have been $404,000. If you were born just 30 years later, in 2005, your lifetime tax burden is $2.27 million. Suffering under a crushing tax load that takes half their earnings every year, many working Canadians are now turning to food banks just to feed their families. And the truly shocking thing is that the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has proven that the budget can be balanced, without costing Canadians what services they have left, and leaving them with substantially more money in their pockets. (1:03 - 1:49) The CTF has been sounding the alarm on taxes in Canada since 1990, and is pushing back most recently with a lawsuit against Trudeau's government over Revenue Canada implementing new capital gains tax changes that will further impoverish Canadians, without those changes having been approved by Parliament, a move which is illegal under our constitution. Kris Sims is the Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and she joins me today to blow away the smoke our federal government is using to attempt to hide the true tax situation, and how it is destroying our country. Kim, welcome to the show. (1:50 - 2:39) Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking your time for this because there's been a lot of smoke and mirrors from the Liberal government over taxes and what they're doing. You've joined me today to make this clear to our viewers about what really is going on. And I wanted to start though with some statistics that alarmed even me. One of the initiatives you guys have now done is another site called generationscrewed.ca, which of course is aimed at younger people to inform them of, yeah, just how screwed they are. There's this wonderful short little video right on the front page. And I just, I was speechless. The video says, if you were born in 1975, your tax burden is $404,000. If you were born 30 years later in 2005, your tax burden is $2.27 million. (2:41 - 3:33) $2.27 million over the course of your life that you were going to have to pay in taxes. Yeah, from start to finish. And you got to keep in mind if you add all that up, right? So quite often a group like the Fraser Institute will put out a yearly survey where they report on how much we're paying in taxes, and it's roughly half. So put another way, if you close your eyes and picture whatever lands in your bank account every two weeks, or if you still paid at the paper check or something, imagine what lands in your bank account every two weeks. Double it. That's how much the government is taking from you. Like imagine what you could do with double the amount of net income you take in. Could you afford better food? Could you save money for a down payment? Could you actually get the repair done on your house you need to do? Could you save for your kids' education after school? Think about that money. That's how much government takes from us. (3:33 - 3:47) So that's various levels of government, of course. That's municipal, provincial and federal. But yeah, combine those three, you know, dragon heads and you put it over the lifetime of a working person. Yeah. So that's why it's called Generation Screwed. That's our youth group. (3:47 - 4:09) And basically their job is to spread the word about lower taxes, less waste and more accountable smaller government on university campuses. Because as we all know, it's often where university students are force fed this nonsense of big government, big spending, utopian dreaming. And so we try to counter that with Generation Screwed. (4:10 - 4:14) Right. And of course, we're basically, we're not getting anything for it anymore. Just. (4:15 - 4:23) They're taking half of our income while they're borrowing record amounts. Yeah. And they still can't provide Canadians with basic services like decent health care. (4:23 - 5:59) Oh, it's brutal. I know when you put it that way. And so I've been in the game for a long time. I'm a child of the seventies. And so I remember when Reagan first won, that's dating me. So you start thinking about what are we getting for this in return? Okay. Well, at the municipal level, people typically expect their city governments to do three things. Keep the streets safe, clean and in good repair. Is that happening? Do you feel safer walking around your streets? Is it cleaner or all those potholes filled in or are your local city councillors trying to save the world at some up with people conference or passing stupid laws that make your property taxes go up? It's usually going to be the latter. Same thing at the provincial government when it comes to actually the function of health care. When's the last time that you had a great family doctor that you can trust and go back and forth with if you have a family doctor? When's the last time you went to the emergency room and you didn't notice that it was full of non-emergency people and you found it was really great care? Federal level, crossing the border, trying to get a passport, something like that. Good luck. So yeah, unfortunately, I'm not trying to be grim. We're paying half of our salaries to various levels of government and getting terrible services in return. And it's not just income tax, it's other taxes as well. Give us a short list of what taxes we're being subjected to that's adding up to that 50% of our income. Oh, it's brutal. So from the moment you wake up in the morning, you make your coffee, you throw the filter in the garbage or the compost or whatever, boom, there's your municipal level. (5:59 - 8:23) There's your municipal taxes. Walk out the door, step foot on your lawn, there's your property taxes. Just envision this. Get into your vehicle, that's your registration cost. And if you're in, say, British Columbia and you have government controlled auto insurance, boom, there's your next level of the government, the state reaching into your pocket. You hit the road. If you're municipal still, there's municipal taxes. If you hit provincial highways, there's your provincial taxes. You start cycling through it this way. Now you start adding big federal. So let's just start with provincial still. We're paying quite often in most of Canada, you're paying income tax to your province and a sales tax to your province. Not here in God's country of Alberta, thank you very much. But most of the rest of Canada, they all have to get nuked with a sales tax. So that's provincial. And then there's all sorts of fees, of course, that they hide, right? They call it a fee or a levy or some nonsense. It's a tax. If the government takes money from you, and it's non-optional, that's a tax. So then you get to the federal level and boom, my gosh, the income tax costs coming out the door. And then we have things like capital gains taxes, which they've just hiked without representation, by the way. And the big one, as I'm sure your viewers and listeners are aware of, and that's right here on my T-shirt, is the carbon tax. And the carbon tax is like this Hydra. It's this multi-headed monster. Can I go through the various levels of this thing, how you're hit with this thing? I would love you to, please do. Okay. So it's going up on April 1st. It's like the worst April Fool's joke ever. It goes up automatically every year on April 1st under this current Trudeau slash liberal government. So as of April 1st, after that increase, filling up a minivan costs you $15 extra just in the carbon tax, not including GST, which is added after. Filling up a pickup truck, $25 extra. Filling up a big rig truck with diesel, if you're a trucker and you deliver everything we eat and use, thanks very much, you're paying about $250 extra to fill your big rig tanks with diesel in the one carbon tax. And I'm specifying because we actually have about three in Canada, plus sales tax. So let's move on from the trucker. (8:23 - 8:32) Say you're a farmer and you have to keep your chickens and your pigs and your cows alive. You got to heat the barns. You're paying a carbon tax on your natural gas and your propane. (8:33 - 9:04) The farmer also, if you add it all up, the parliamentary budget officer did the math, by 2030. So in five years, that's going to cost Canadian farmers a billion dollars. Truckers, just last year, this number blew my mind. Just last year, long haul trucking, not including interprovincial short haul trucking, just long haul, $2 billion. It gets worse, I know. Then you say you go shopping, you go to like a building, like a grocery store. (9:04 - 10:03) They got to keep the lights on. They got to run things hot and cold all the time. They're usually going to be using natural gas to do that. They pay the carbon tax. In some provincial jurisdictions like Alberta, institutions pay the carbon tax, like hospitals and schools. It is the craziest thing. You get home and you try to hide from these taxes. Home heating. So the average household here in Alberta, if they're heating with natural gas, which about 90% of us do, that average household is going to pay about $400 extra, just in the carbon tax, for the sin of heating your home in Canada. So that is the multi-layered layer cake from hell, that is the carbon tax. And then you get into other elements of federal taxes, like payroll taxes, elements like that. But needless to say, as I've described through all those layers, all the way from municipal, all the way up to federal things, federal taxes, this is why it's taking half our income. (10:04 - 11:55) Right. Now we're going to get into some of those other taxes later, but I want to stick with the carbon tax for just a minute. We'll talk about the farce of the carbon tax rebates in a minute. One thing that's really bothered me is the government refusing to tell us how much money they're generating from the carbon taxes. Does the CTF have any data on that? Because the government doesn't want us to know. So to add insult to injury, not only are they screwing us with the carbon tax on our essentials, like driving to work, heating your home and eating, are not options that we can just opt out of. OK, there's not like choosing between ice hockey and field hockey here. These are essentials. It's about, last time I checked in the federal government's budget document, it was about $13 billion. But the insult part that I was going to allude to there is that they didn't call it the carbon tax income. They called it something ridiculous, like climate fee that will be rebated fully to Canadians. I'm out. I'm not kidding. It's gross. Like George Orwell is turning in his grave. So I'm from British Columbia originally, lived born and raised out there. I worked on Parliament Hill for like 20 years. But before I was the Alberta director for the CTF, I was the BC director. The BC government has been screwing people with the carbon tax since 2008. They started this trend. To be clear, though, at least in their budget document, they list it as the carbon tax revenue, like it's right there spelled out with all those letters. And so they were doing that in their budget year over year. So you could at least see it right away. I had to dig and get super creative to find it in the Trudeau budget, which, by the way, is way too long, like it's hundreds of pages. (11:55 - 12:01) Yes, it is. A federal budget should be about 85 pages long, mostly math and tables. 497 pages this past year. (12:01 - 12:16) What's that? 497 pages this past year. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. And most of it is verbiage. It's not numbers and tables and data. I'm sorry, if you want to push for saving the world in some way, do that in another document. (12:17 - 12:27) This is a budget that we're all supposed to be able to read, but they fill it full of, you know, unicorn feathers and baffle gobs, so you can't find the carbon tax. Right. And they hide other things in that budget too now. (12:27 - 12:43) Oh, yeah. Amending other bills that have nothing to do with the budget. Isn't it sick? I know. And then that's when they start shoving it through. They think they can hide it in there. Now, fortunately, we've got good people who are, like yourself, who are reading it, and they don't get away with it, but they're certainly trying. (12:43 - 15:47) They do. My dear friend, Franco Terrazzano, is the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Super great guy, really into baseball. Don't tell anybody, but he's got two master's degrees, including in economics. So he's this friendly guy on video, but when he gets down to reading a budget, he can just read it inside and out. And so between him and our investigative journalist, Ryan Thorpe, they dig up most things. I'm sure there is still some subterfuge in there that we have not yet found because it's that bad. So what is the final tally, roughly? I mean, based on the research you guys have done, how much money is the federal government making every year from this carbon tax? Federally, it's around, so as of this past fiscal year, the latest data we have was, if I recall correctly, just over $12 billion, close to $13 billion. And if you want to kind of figure out how much money that is, it costs about a billion dollars to build a new hospital, an entire new hospital. So just picture that. Right. So now if, let's hope, Pierre Poilievre gets elected and he follows through on his threat to ax that tax, how much money is that going to save the average Canadian every year? That's a great question. And it is a little bit complicated. So folks might remember when the parliamentary budget officer first came out with his numbers about how much this was costing. It was costing, after rebates, when he first analyzed it, the average Albertan, around $900, net, after their so-called rebates, okay? Then he came back and revised the number, and it was still a crazy amount of money. It was like $300 or $400. But I need to stress that the carbon tax, as I just described it, as it leeches through and corrodes the economy, costs people a hidden amount of money. So it's not just, you know, Marcy with her little Mazda hatchback that's spending, you know, 10 bucks extra to fill up the carbon tax. No. It's when she's buying her food. It's when she's buying her clothes that have been trucked here. It's when she's having to pay for municipal services and provincial services, and, and, and, and. It's all that layering. So it's really difficult to give you an exact amount on that, because the carbon tax is basically a tax on everything, often because of the trucking element. So in Canada, if you look around the room that you're in, whoever's listening or watching this, look around. Pretty much everything around you has been on a truck once or five times before it got into your hands. You just got to start doing that math and adding all of that up. So the short answer is, it's really hard to know. But it's a Keep in mind also that the rebates don't cover the GST, which is hundreds of millions of dollars per year that the government is pulling in just with the GST on the carbon tax. No nickel of that is rebated. (15:47 - 15:53) We can't really put a final figure on it. It's certainly well in excess of the $900. I think so. (15:53 - 16:14) As a tax alone. Right. And it's not just... So yeah, we want, if Pierre Polio becomes prime minister, we want him to scrap the carbon tax before lunch, like first day. Frankly, we want the liberal leadership candidates who are coming out all of a sudden to try to replace Trudeau. We want them to say, I'm scrapping it right now. Oh my God, this is a terrible failure. (16:14 - 16:34) Because we have a deadline coming up April 1st. So everybody's tax bill is going to go up April 1st. We have got so short a time. We want everybody to kill this thing. But let's say for argument's sake that it's the Conservatives who win and they scrap the carbon tax. You will see a nearly immediate reduction at the pump. (16:34 - 17:31) So you'll see it drop by about 13 cents or so. But it'll take a little while for that, the trucking example that I gave you, the home heating, that sort of thing to finally trickle down and filter through and save people money. And it's not just that the carbon tax is helping to make everything cost much more, but it's also inflation. And the Trudeau government is responsible for the inflation too, because they printed hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air while they locked down our means of production. So we had the perfect storm of crazy money printing and no widgets being made. So it's both things. It's the carbon tax plus inflation that's costing us. And I do want to talk about that inflation, but I have one more question about the carbon tax. And that has to do with the, to me at least, blatant illogic of imposing this carbon tax and then turning around and telling cities, well, we're going to give you a rebate. (17:32 - 17:48) This makes no sense whatsoever. It's clearly smoke and mirrors. I've heard from lots of people who said, well, I've never gotten a check. My wife and I have certainly never gotten a check. I've never seen a dime of rebate. It almost seems to me like, well, I'm sorry to say it, but it seems like a blatant lie. (17:50 - 18:22) So there's a few things there. One, I don't think I have either, but who the heck knows? Maybe it's bundled with like GST rebates or what we used to call, you know, baby bucks back in the 80s. Who knows? The long and the short of it is it defies common sense to believe the government when they say, give us a $20 bill and we'll give you back a 50 at no cost to you. That's not how this works. That is not how money works. And that is not how government works. (18:23 - 18:51) Government is not an investment. They are not a wealth generating mechanism. So when we give them our money, they do not turn it around for value on the dollar. That's not how this works. So anyone who believes that, like I've got oceanfront property in Lethbridge to sell you, okay, should defy common sense. Second, again, the parliamentary budget officer went through this with a fine tooth comb. (18:51 - 20:02) The average Canadian family, when considering all of the costs of the carbon tax, is out money, net, even after rebates. To your point on the dishonesty element, if I can point this out for folks who forget, the carbon tax was supposed to be a deterrent for using oil and gas products. That's the entire point. The entire point of the carbon tax, when it was started by both the B.C. government and then federally, because Trudeau used B.C. as a template, was to stick you, you know, the whole carrot and stick, was to hit you with a stick whenever you dared use an oil and gas product. It was this idea, this utopian idea, that I remember back when they first launched it in 2008, the B.C. government promised us many things. They said that the carbon tax would stop at $30 a ton, that it would be revenue neutral, that it would create a plethora of alternative, affordable, abundant energy sources, and that it would make emissions go down and make us hit our targets. (20:03 - 21:00) None of those things is true. Not one. What they ran into here, frankly, is that Canadians have been beaten into a corner by this carbon tax, and they don't have an alternative. We don't have a plethora of affordable, abundant, alternative energy sources waiting at our doorstep. We don't. There are some people who are able to do super intense things, like only heat with an electric heat pump, and they go solar, and they use their bike pedals, and they live off-grid. For sure, there are some people like that. I lived on Vancouver Island. I know they exist, but they are not the majority of working families in Canada. Most of us rely on a gas or diesel powered vehicle. Most of us have to go to the grocery store to buy our food, which is raised by farmers and brought to us by truckers. We can't live on the carrots that we grow on our balcony. (21:01 - 23:20) Most of us have to heat our home with something like a natural gas or a propane. So we have been beaten financially into a corner by this carbon tax, and there's no way out. The government just keeps hitting us. I think they had to realize and change their narrative of saying, oh, this is just kind of to redistribute the wealth and give more money back to the poor people and take it from the rich people. They've moved away entirely from the environment argument. Why? Because they suck. Because they haven't met any of their targets. So the BC carbon tax, when it was launched, it said it was going to reduce their emissions by something like 30% below 2007 levels. Sure didn't. They're above 2007 levels. They totally missed that target. Federally, we keep on missing our emissions targets too, including from the Environment Commissioner. An independent Environment Commissioner saying, guys, we are hitting this target at all. So they were kind of stuck. And that is why you heard Prime Minister Justin Trudeau say jaw-dropping things like the only type of person who feels the cost of the carbon tax, meaning poor people and low-income people and middle-income people get more back than they pay in. He actually said repeatedly, the only type of person that feels the cost of the carbon tax is someone who lives in a big mansion with an indoor pool with three big personal cars. Like how he was raised. Yes. And it's totally crazy. Like you ask the average person who's looking at their heat bill and they've got a $40 charge from the carbon tax there. They're paying it. They know they're paying it. But Trudeau doesn't know that we're paying it because he's never had to pay a bill in his life. So frankly, this is why they've had to switch their narrative from this is going to save the planet. Oops, no, it's not saving the planet. Oh, this is going to, you know, create, I don't know, blue hydrogen or something that we're all able to use. And then it doesn't. And now it's trickled down to, oh, but, you know, poor people deserve their rebates. And that bad man wants to get rid of your rebates. This is all just like you said, smoke and mirrors. Right. So now let's talk about that, that debt, because you mentioned this earlier. Sorry, I cannot go with the carbon tax for three hours. (23:21 - 23:38) No, that's quite all right. I'm absolutely certain that everything you have said has just resonated with the viewers. We're all very upset about this as we should be. But now let's talk about the debt. And I want your clarification on something to make sure that I didn't misunderstand something. There's a difference between the term federal debt and national debt. (23:39 - 24:56) Federal debt is 1.2 trillion. Yes. But national debt is 2.1 because you have to add in all the provincial debts as well. Oh, I see what you're doing. Okay. Yeah, you could. Am I correct? So when you look at 1.2 trillion, that's not really the number. Yeah, I've heard people refer to it as the entire debt. So when I hear national debt, I usually just think federal debt, like our debt clock, $1.2 trillion. Both federal and national have been used interchangeably. But for the purposes of this conversation, if you'd want to separate it as the federal debt, which is the federal government's incurred deficits year by year, all added up together, yeah, that's 1.2 trillion. I'd have to go look to add up all the provinces. But if you're saying it's over, you said just over 2 trillion? 2.1 is the figure that is on, it's either on taxpayer.com or it's on general. Okay. Well, that's another 800 billion. You'd really have to add it because I know Alberta's is around 80 something. Ontario's is going to be big. Yeah, I could see that. I would have to go back to verify though, to be absolutely sure. Okay. But where I was leading with that is now, let's talk about that $343 billion in COVID debt. (24:57 - 25:56) Sorry, how much would you say? 343 billion. That's what I've taken, again, from your website. That's the amount of debt that they ran up during the lockdowns. Yeah, it's brutal. So given the entire nine years, not even just during the lockdown, because of course, like I've said, they printed money like crazy, and they borrowed money like crazy, because things were shut down and everything was going to hell in a handbasket. So if you look over the nine years of Trudeau, of the Trudeau government from 2015 until now, they have doubled the federal debt, doubled it. So when Harper left, it was just over 600 billion, which is still a lot of money. It is now $1.2 trillion. And to give you kind of a mind's eye view of that, like picture all the previous governments of Canada ever, like picture Harper, picture the first Trudeau, Diefenbaker, all the way back to John A. Macdonald. (25:57 - 26:27) Picture their Great Depressions that they had, and the World Wars and all the other crazy stuff that's happened over that time. And all of the debts they rack up, double it. That is what the second Trudeau government has done. It's astonishing. Yes. And to put that, or to put that another way, to put it in perspective for people, Trudeau in nine years has accumulated as much debt for Canada as all previous administrations put together before him. Correct. Correct. And a trillion is such a huge number. (26:27 - 29:08) Like it's a thousand billion. There are 12 zeros after that. If you and I started doing Scrooge McDuck style counting up our gold coins and imagine them to be loonies, it would take a person 30,000 years to count to one trillion. That is how much debt we are in, just for the federal debt, not including all the provincial debts. Right. So now let's get into some of the changes that are coming up, which once again, with my limited understanding, I look at them and I see more smoke and mirrors telling people that they're going to be benefiting them when they're really not. The inflation adjusted tax brackets is the most recent news that these are coming up. And I'm going to read from it just because it's, like I said, I'm not a financial person myself. So a 2.7% increase in income tax brackets to account for inflation, which they caused. The adjustment is intended to prevent Canadians from being pushed into higher tax brackets due to rising prices. However, the federal tax rates remain unchanged and more income will be taxed at lower rates due to these adjustments. So if I'm understanding this, it doesn't put people any farther ahead. So it's not a tax break, but it's not a tax increase. So what this is often referred to as is called bracket creep. OK, that is where inflation goes out of control, like we've seen, but their tax brackets don't adjust with it. What they're doing, and it's probably by accident because that's the right thing for them to do. I'm not giving them credit. They are adjusting the brackets with inflation from what you just read out there. That's what needs to happen. They need to keep those brackets moving along so that a person, for example, who is technically getting paid more due to inflation, but inflation has gone crazy. So their buying power hasn't improved, isn't getting screwed with a higher tax bracket. It means that they have to earn more in order to get up into that bracket. They don't automatically fall into that bracket. Do you understand what I mean? Exactly. Yes. Thank you for explaining that. OK, so now the reduction of tax rates for the middle class, this is another one, reduced the second lowest personal income tax rate from 22% to 20.5%. This is presented as a tax cut for the middle class, but the reduction was offset by the elimination of several tax credits, including those for children's fitness and arts, public transit and education. So essentially they wiped it out. They're giving it with one hand and taking away from the other. This is it, because government, if you give them an inch, it'll take a mile from you. (29:08 - 29:56) Also income splitting. A lot of people might forget that we had income splitting for the last, I think it was two years, maybe one year of Harper. And that is where a single income family could income split between the two partners if they had children. And so therefore they're paying a lot less in taxes. So otherwise they're getting nailed on the full amount and they're having to pay higher income taxes. So taking away income splitting, that affected a lot of middle class families or working families. They also have increased the payroll taxes. So those are the automatic taxes that come off of your paycheck every month or every two weeks. So things like EI and CPP. OK, and you can't, they're going to try to whittle out of that, say those aren't taxes. Number one, yes, they are. They're even called payroll taxes on the federal government website. (29:56 - 30:37) And two, you can't opt out of them. So again, anytime the government takes your money and you can't opt out of it, that is a tax. So they increased those. And then, of course, what we just finished talking about, the carbon tax. You nail people with this enormous carbon tax, which affects their everything, then no, you are not, what is it, helping the middle class and those working hard to join it. So no, we aren't better off. And you know what? They don't even need to take our word for it. Look around you. You know, do you feel better off as a working class person or a middle income person? We have now got record amount of people relying on food banks. (30:38 - 31:09) And so every, you know, six months or so, I'll call a food bank and I'll ask, how's it going? You know, what are you seeing? And it's the same thing from the food bank groups themselves. They give this in their poverty report every year. They say something like we are seeing record demand from working parents. What that means in normal people talk is that a parent who's holding down a job still has to rely on donated jars of peanut butter to feed their kid. Yes. Here in Canada. (31:09 - 32:50) And if they, for their housing expenses and their transportation costs and everything they need to keep that job, they don't have any money left over to feed their family with. That's right. We have now got, it's a brutal statistic. And I'm going to try to give some light at the end of this because I don't want people getting too down, but it's a brutal statistic. Around 50 percent, close to half of Canadians now report. This is a major MNP report they put out every year. Half of Canadians are now reporting they're within $200 of not being able to make the minimum payments on their bills. And what I mean by that is minimum payment on their credit card, minimum payment on their line of credit, throwing money down on a super scary hydro bill or a power bill and convincing them to just keep your lights on. Borrowing money from a friend to make rent. That is what that means. Minimum payment. So they're within $200 of insolvency. Half of Canadians. That is astonishing. So yeah, half. I think it's 47 percent. No way to get out. It's grim. And so if somebody tells you that they've helped make the middle class more rich. Right. Good night. No. So now that we're on to the middle class, let's talk about capital gains taxes and the changes they made there. Yes. So capital gains tax. And I would say this honestly, if the NDP had put out a really good video explaining what the capital gains tax is. Because Canadian Taxpayers Federation, we don't care what color the jersey is of the party because all politicians can lie to you and take your money and waste it on stupid things. (32:50 - 32:57) We should mention this. It's very important. People who are employed by working with the CTF, you may not belong to a political party. (32:58 - 33:15) No, not even our board. So we don't have anything to do with our jobs, but even our board aren't allowed. Okay. And we've been around since 1990 and we were started in 1990 mostly as opposition to the GST, which was brought in by a conservative government. Okay. So I just want to be clear. (33:15 - 33:32) All that said, up here, Poilievre put out an outstanding video on capital gains taxes and what a capital gain is. It actually reminded me of one of those kind of educational videos you saw from the late 50s, early 60s. You know, these are the means of production and this is how this works. (33:33 - 34:55) So I would recommend anybody go to YouTube and find that. So basically what that is, is say you own a house, like the bank owns it, but you're paying mortgage on it, but it's your title. It's your house. Say you have a secondary property, like a cottage or a cabin, or your parent unfortunately has passed away. And now you own that secondary property. Perhaps you rent it out. Maybe it's Airbnb. Who knows? You sell it. That secondary property is subject to capital gains tax. That's one example. A second example, say you are a business owner, say you're a heavy duty mechanic and you own a lot of equipment, parts washers, you know, you build your own stuff. That's really expensive equipment. You sell it. The government will consider that to be a capital gain. Okay. Same sort of thing. I'm not sure if you sell the actual business, if that's the one that's nailed with capital gains, but your stuff is. Or a physician. This actually surprised me because I didn't realize this. A lot of physicians, the way that they manage their finances, because they don't get a government pension or something the way a nurse does, for example, a doctor often structures his or her finances so that they put their money into capital and then they sell it as they retire. And that's what pays for their golden years because they don't have a pension. (34:56 - 36:46) And we, apparently it was always the word at medical schools and when they were graduating for decades that this is how you do it because we don't have pensions. Now the government has increased the capital gains tax. So you will now pay more. It's kind of considered income. Okay. When you sell that secondary property or that parts washer, or if you're a physician and you're selling property, if you're selling capital. The horrible thing about this, apart from that being a huge tax grab that doesn't help anybody because they'll blow through. I think they're going to blow through the capital gains tax increase in like a week, something crazy based on their spending. Okay. So it's not helping poor people. Apart from that, the Canada Revenue Agency, the CRA is considering that capital gains tax hike to be valid, even though it did not clear through Parliament Hill yet. When they prorogued, it had not yet cleared. It did not have the royal stamp of approval, but the CRA is considering that it is already increased. So we're now getting phone calls from people saying, Hey, if I've sold my property or, you know, sold, you know, made a capital gain post June, like just this past June, 2024, the CRA is nailing me at a higher rate, even though it has not passed Parliament. So that is a big deal. That is, that is taxation of the representation. I want to make a comment on that because not that this is going to surprise anybody who's been watching Trudeau's government, but it occurs to me that if you're going to impose a tax that has not yet met with parliamentary approval, is that not illegal? It should be. So this is why, so taxation of the representation isn't just like a nice term. (36:46 - 38:15) It's not like, you know, peace through strength or something like that, which is still a good term. It's not just a phrase. It's in our constitution of Canada. So yeah, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, we're in the middle of saddling up and taking the federal government to court. So we're in the process of doing it now and dotting all of our I's. It'll take a couple of weeks to get a good case going. But like, no, no. And I don't imagine we'll be alone. There's probably going to be some other advocacy organizations jumping in on this because there is no way that Canadians should be paying a higher capital gains tax rate without it having cleared Parliament. It's wild. And it just speaks to what people often refer to as permanent government. Right? So your viewers are probably, go ahead. This is Trudeau's government, one-sidedly imposing a tax that the rest of the elected representative in our government have had no say on. Yeah. It's not, it's not passed. And then the Senate has to have its go at it. And then the Governor General, who represents His Majesty the King Charles III, because yeah, we're in a constitutional monarchy, that's how our government works, has not stamped that thing. But it's still happening. It is mind-blowing. So this is why we're fighting it. Our Atlantic Director, Devin Drover, he's also our in-house counsel, which is a nice way of saying our lawyer. (38:15 - 39:20) So he's drafting this up right now. He was the gentleman who was at the committee fighting the carbon tax while at the same time I was down the hall at the committee fighting to defund the CBC. So folks remember that gentleman there, that's our Atlantic Director and he's also our head counsel. So they're busy drafting that stuff up. Okay. Now you had given us a very nice explanation of the changes to the capital gains tax, but what is going to be the fallout of those changes for the average Canadian? How's it going to affect them? Great question. Other than obviously it's going to cost them more money, but I'm talking in practical terms, we've already got people in the lower income classes struggling just to feed their families. Yes. So the lower income class usually doesn't own more than one property, even if they're lucky to own one. And so they might think, oh, well, this doesn't affect me. It does affect you. Because like I just described, physicians are getting directly affected by this. And we were already losing doctors to other countries. I can't imagine now what a doctor will be thinking. In fact, I can. (39:23 - 40:13) Just under a year ago, when I was in the emergency room with a friend of mine who is having a heart issue, and unprompted, because I think I was wearing my jacket or something, because I'm focused on my friend. I'm not even thinking about capital gains. And this was around the same time they were talking about increasing the capital gains tax increase. Three separate doctors at different times, they weren't around each other, mentioned this to me. And this is like, I wasn't asking them. They mentioned it to me, saying this is directly affecting my bottom line. I've got a buddy who's coming up through med school right now. I'm telling him to not even set up shop here. This is outrageous. I feel betrayed. How am I going to be able to manage this once I'm old and out of here? I don't have a pension. Now, folks might think, oh, well, boohoo rich doctors. (40:14 - 40:35) Most of us do need a doctor at some point in our lives. And it doesn't seem like we have an awful lot kicking around to spare. Do we really want to start driving away physicians from Canada? And then also, like I described, quite often, we have older parents, say they're older boomers, or older even than that, if some of us are fortunate enough to still have grandparents. (40:35 - 41:17) They give you a property that is given to you, and you have to sell it. You're getting nailed with stuff like this. And again, it's also it causes confusion as well. I was just we were doing a debt clock tour where we take that $1.2 trillion and we stick it on a big digital board on a truck and we drive it around Canada. And I was at a debt clock tour event in Red Deer. And it was heartbreaking. There's this young couple, man and wife, and they bust their butts and they find old houses that only have two bedrooms upstairs, you know, the kind of the smaller square minor houses. They'll find those and then they work all day. They work all day. (41:17 - 44:43) He does the really heavy lifting of the plumbing and stuff. And the wife comes in and does all the painting and fixes it up and makes it so that it's three bedrooms upstairs plus a bathroom so it's better for families. And they sell it for a very modest profit. Like these folks are just scraping by. They were so worried about this capital gains tax increase. They're living in their garage like on cots. So I know it made me so mad because here's this guy. You can tell he's been working since he was 12. Same goes for the wife. And they're so scared about this capital gains tax increase they were sleeping on cots in their garage. And they're trying to raise kids and it's in a construction zone. They don't really have a kitchen. They can barely use the bathroom because they're living in like a renovation situation where they're gutting a house. It's just crazy. And why were they doing that? Because they were so worried about getting completely obliterated by this capital gains tax and its impending increase. So again, even if that wouldn't have affected them, it drastically changed their life and how they're living it and raising their kids. So again, this thing has got to go in the dustbin. There is a major stock market crash coming that will rival the crash of 1929. But there is a way to not only protect your wealth but profit in the coming crash. The stock market chart today looks exactly like the charts prior to October 1929. Banks are disastrously over leveraged and several major US banks have already failed. And the CDIC, the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation, doesn't have nearly enough money to cover depositors. 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They didn't have to worry about feeding their children and heating their house. And now we've got a large percentage of working Canadians, working Canadians doing their jobs, working as best as they can, as hard as they can, and they can't make ends meet. Yep. My husband often likes to say, when we were growing up in the 80s, the local school janitor owned a house. Like, this wasn't a luxury item. Like, it wasn't a mansion with, what did he say, an indoor heated swimming pool and three big personal cars? Drives me crazy. But the local janitor owned a house, for sure. This was standard. And it's something I appreciated that Pierre Poilievre said to Dr. Jordan Peterson in his recent interview with him. Because I run into people all the time with the Taxpayers Federation, where I do still have some older folks say, kids these days don't know how to wo-ho-ho-ho. Yes, they do. Kids these days are working. A lot. And it's something that Polyev said, because he gets a lot of people coming out to his rallies, and he stands there and gets pictures with them. He stands there for like three hours. (45:57 - 46:12) Imagine the stories he's getting at that photo lineup. And he said, yeah, by and large, most young people are working their guts out. They work two or three jobs while going to school. (46:13 - 49:35) And this is heartbreaking, having lost the hope of ever owning a home of their own. Right. And that was a really good point, Kim, that you've got these kids who are going to school, going to college to get an education, working two or three jobs just to get through. And at the end, what can they expect? Maybe be able to make a living and rent an apartment somewhere, certainly to own a home or build a future. Yeah. And we're talking like an older rancher built. Like, they're not talking about some McMansion that they can go move in. Like, those are like hardcore, you know, doctor plus lawyer plus, you know, you're renting out your basement type houses nowadays for people, especially coming from B.C. This is where we're at. And almost all of it is as a result of government behavior and government choices, most of it federal government choices. So between inflation and blowing their budgets, wasting a ton of money and crazy high taxes, including things like the carbon tax, this is why we're in this pickle. I'll also point out that this isn't just people will try to say, oh, well, you know, it was just for argument's sake. They'll say something like, oh, it was COVID and we all were panicking and, you know, they only had to do it for a little while. No, no, no, no. OK. The Trudeau government was blowing money before COVID hit our shores. OK. So in the year 2018, 2019, picture what that was like. It's actually hard for me to remember the before times, but picture it anyway. Nobody's invading. Nothing crazy is happening. 2018, 2019. OK. They spent more money in that year than any one year of the Second World War. Adjusted for inflation and population. Right. So while we were fighting the Nazis, we were spending less money as a federal government than Trudeau did for whatever reason in 2018, 2019. Like, don't tell me this is all because, you know, they frantically had to help people during lockdown. That's not true. Right. And not only do Canadians have nothing to show for all of that, we're way worse off now than we used to be. Yeah, I know. And it gets grim. But I do think that change is coming and I am very encouraged. For example, the carbon tax back before, you know, around 2018, it was tough for us to get pieces published on the carbon tax because they'd say something like, oh, well, you know, it's helping the environment, which it wasn't. It's not costing that much money, which it was. But now I think the message has gotten through symbolically even to people of how terrible the carbon tax is. And it's so unpopular that the folks who crafted it, OK, people like B.C., former B.C. Premier Christy Clark, who had a carbon tax and loved it for years in British Columbia, people like the liberal candidates are having to go, you know what, maybe we should throw this thing overboard because it's really bad. If even those folks are now saying we need to scrap the carbon tax, I think we've turned a corner. I think that symbolizes that people are engaged. They're in the arena. They're mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore. So I do have hope that things are going to improve over the next few years. (49:36 - 49:42) Good. Now, you mentioned earlier, wanted to finish on a positive note, which you've just started with. I like to finish interviews on a positive note. (49:42 - 50:24) We often have to talk about some very grim things that are happening to our country, but I am quite certain that the CTF has done a lot of research on this and how we might fix these problems. What are some of the proposed solutions? Awesome. So the big stuff. Okay. If anybody wants to actually figure out how to balance the budget, they can go to our website, taxpayer.com, look up free budget reports. Okay. We've got them there, like, probably for the last decade at the federal and provincial levels. And like I was mentioning, my friend Franco Terrazano, our federal director, I think his last free budget report was like 72 pages. And he's going through line by line. (50:24 - 50:54) Here's where you reduce. Here's where you cut. Here's where you save money. Here's how you can, all this stuff. And he balances the budget. The short answer is, if the federal government went back to the 2022 level of projected spending by the Trudeau government, we would balance the budget. It's wild. This is how much money we're wasting all the time. So the point is, if we get rid of all the wastage, we can balance the budget. (50:54 - 53:03) We can pay down the debt. We can return Canadians to a secure environment where they can feed their children and put a roof over their heads and maybe even own a home. Yeah. This is so doable. Okay. So I'll give you an example of ArriveCAN. Okay. Everybody's favorite app when we were trying to enter back into our own country and had to report to the government. It didn't even work, by the way. I had to try to use it at one point. It didn't even work. ArriveCAN. Just, well, this is one example. There are thousands. ArriveCAN was supposed to cost, at cost, about $80,000. It wound up costing close to $60 million, just add government. So this is why Grover Norquist with the, I think it's the Canadian, the American, Americans for Tax Reform. He worked in the Reagan administration. He's the one that gave the famous line of government ought to be small enough that you can drown it in the bathtub. It's a little grim. I like to say drown it in a teacup or something cuter, but this is why. Just add government. Who else could take an app that is supposed to be super simple, hand it out to their friends, totally screw it over, and then spend close to $60 million on the thing? So there is an example of waste. Another example of waste that people forget, the Phoenix pay system was the simple, supposed to be a simple software change on how they do their payroll at the federal government. And yeah, that includes a lot of paper pushers in the Ottawa-Gatineau region in their offices, but it also includes some serious stuff like Coast Guard pay. They screwed that up so much, I think they wasted more than a billion dollars on it, again, with a B. So say they wasted $1.4 billion on it, like they do with the CBC. For that kind of money, you could pay the full-time salaries of 7,000 cops and 7,000 paramedics. Combined. For a year. Those are the big wastes, those billions of dollars. (53:03 - 53:29) Then you get into the little waste, and you use the Rudy Giuliani school of thought of broken windows, right? Making sure you don't allow for broken windows in your neighborhood improves the safety of the entire city. It's how it works. So you go after little stuff, like we highlight in the Teddy Waste Awards every year, we were talking about that before we hit record, where we hand out golden pig statues to bureaucrats and politicians who waste your money in spectacular fashion. (53:30 - 54:14) We spent thousands of dollars on a sex toy show in Germany. Yes, I've heard about that. Yeah, we spent thousands of dollars keeping a hotline open for Canadian diplomats so they could pick up a phone and call in and fly in a Canadian chef. I'm not kidding. We spent money on government departments doing their own podcasts. Like, not funding the media, which they do and should not do, because it's outrageous. Journalists should never be paid by the government because we need a free press. But no, no, no. Bureaucrats getting together, like within stats can, to talk amongst themselves and put that out as a podcast. (54:14 - 54:39) Like, they were literally talking about, like, gay ghosts. So you are spending money on this. I know, right? Like, if I want to listen to Freddie Mercury and David Bowie in the underworld, like, I'm there for it. But don't make taxpayers pay for that. Right, exactly. So the short answer then, Kim, is the CTF has already balanced the budget. (54:40 - 55:02) You just have to have a government where you can hand it to them and say, look, here's the budget. Canadians insist you follow it, rather than, say, what Trudeau did, and assigning a woman whose only education is in Slavonic studies and is completely unqualified to be finance minister, and then give her control over it. The vibe session didn't impress you? No? No, no, I'm afraid it did not. (55:02 - 55:09) I know, I know. In all seriousness, Chrystia Freeland, okay, never balanced the budget. No. (55:10 - 1:00:22) Not one time. And that's what kind of blew my mind with the mainstream media trying to, you know, give her some somets on the way out the door because she stood up to Trudeau wasting money. What? No, she didn't. She didn't. Having a guardrail of you're only going to blow your own budget by $40 billion is not fiscally responsible. I'm sorry I need to say this out loud. They were a disaster. And she was the finance minister, also keep in mind, when they froze bank accounts of Canadians who were protesting the government and putting through the Emergencies Act, and frankly, we stand for accountable government, pretty hard to hold the government to account if you can't speak. So yeah, don't give that lady any laurels as far as being a finance minister goes. But to your point, yeah, the federal government, steal our homework, take Franco's binder out of his hands, steal it, use it, we don't care because it saved taxpayers money. All this work has been done. Okay. So as a final question, taxpayer.com, Canadian Taxpayers Federation, you do have a number of things that ordinary Canadians can get involved in to speak out and to support you and what you're doing. Please let us know what those are. Thank you. And this is my positive note to end on. And then Poilievre also mentioned this as well, it wasn't about the CTF, but he talked about basically, if I win and I'm honoured to be Prime Minister, I can't do this by myself. Folks have got to stay politically engaged. Because he's right. He's going to be up against government unions, he's going to be up against mainstream media, he's going to be up against academics, you name it, all sorts of organisations are going to try to scream from the rooftops when he does things like scrap the carbon tax, or defund the CBC, which he has promised to do. So you could just imagine the hue and cry. So to that end, this is where folks, it's so important for you individuals to stay involved and stay engaged. It's similar to what Roosevelt had said about the man in the arena. The credit goes to the man in the arena. So become a tax fighter for free. Then go to our website, taxpayer.com, sign a petition that speaks to you. So if you want to defund the CBC or stop giving taxpayers money to journalists on government payroll, great, sign that one. If you want to scrap the carbon tax, sign that one. If you're worried about a home equity tax hitting you someday, or the capital gains tax, sign that one. We even have stuff on cancelling the firearm seizure. If you want to stop the gun grab, sign those petitions. And what it does is it makes you part of our army list. And so the next time it's time for us to completely flood the inbox of some politician or bureaucrat who's thinking about hiking your taxes or wasting your money, and they've said something stupid, you're on that army. And trust me, they care. They'll pretend they don't, but I've worked in those offices. For every one real email they get from somebody, they assume a hundred other people feel the same way, and they're their voters, because it's the constituents that are emailing these people, and they care about their skins. Members of parliament, at a minimum, the backbench member of parliament is paid $200,000 per year, plus platinum perks. You don't think they're worried about losing their job? And I would also, separate from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, I just want to encourage people to stay engaged however they do it. Build a local community group of people who are of the like mind, and door knock on these issues. For real, go out in your riding and door knock about stuff like scrapping the carbon tax or stopping censorship or something. And it gives you two things. One, it gives you agency, because you are speaking back to the government, and you're representing yourself. And it also gives you a sense of fellowship. It makes you know that you're not alone, and that you do have an ability to change things. And trust me, that's a big mood booster. So I just encourage people to do those two things. Right. And now that you've given me this wonderful opportunity to do a plug for something that we started last year, we have a site called freedomcomms.org. It's the Freedom Communities Communications Network. And that's exactly what we're doing, is that we are building in-person communities across Canada while we protect the identity of our members. So folks, if you're listening to what Tim just said, I recommend you start there. Go to freedomcomms.org. It's free, completely free. It'll take you one minute to sign up, and you can start talking to other people in your area. We have a group here in Calgary that meets every week. I don't set those meetings up. We get people who volunteer to be community coordinators when they join. One of the members is setting that up, and we're already getting about 20, 30 people out every week, where we get to know each other in person, and we can work together. So that dovetails perfectly with what you've just said. And there's a way that you can meet these people and get involved, freedomcomms.org. Tim, thank you so much for your time today and for blowing away the smoke so that we can see what's really going on. It means a lot to us. Thank you so much for your time.