Captain Airhead's Scandalous Spending

Captain Airhead, who is often called by the less flattering epithet Justin Trudeau, has got himself into yet another ethics scandal. Over the past few years the Dominion government had offered grants to companies employing student workers. Captain Airhead had come under much justified criticism for requiring that these employers sign an affirmation of commitment to the latest revised edition of the values of the Liberal Party of Canada, which values are, of course, nothing but progressive and left-wing codswallop and drivel. This year, because of the Chinese bat flu, the government decided to do something extra. Back in April, on his daily morning cartoon show, Captain Airhead announced the creation of a Canada Student Service Grant which would provide students who were spending the summer volunteering for pandemic relief programs with financial assistance. Towards the end of June it was announced that the government was contracting the administration of this grant out to the WE Charity. This is where the scandal comes in. Captain Airhead’s mother and brother have been paid quite handsomely for speaking at this charity’s events in the past. It later came out that there were also connections between the organization and the daughters of Bill Morneau, the Minister of Finance. Neither Captain Airhead nor Morneau had bothered to recuse themselves from the Cabinet when the decision to award the contract to WE was made.

My thought, upon watching this scandal unfold last week, was that the timing could not possibly have been more fortunate – for the Prime Minister. The scandal itself revealed nothing about his character, or lack thereof, that we did not already know and possess evidence in spades. It is extremely unlikely that it will finally end his political career. If the SNC-Lavalin affair and the blackface scandal could not do so last year, the chances of this one doing so are slim to nil. Those who hope otherwise are presumably thinking of this being the “straw that broke the camel’s back” but politicians with a Teflon coating have often proven to be exceptions to that proverb.

The scandal, while unlikely to do much lasting harm to Captain Airhead, broke at just the right time to be a major distraction from the government’s revelation, last week, of just how large a deficit they have racked up since March in the name of protecting Canadians from the fiscal and economic consequences of the ill-advised universal quarantine imposed to combat the coronavirus. This deficit exceeds $343 billion, almost $100 billion more than what was estimated by the Parliamentary Budget Officer in April, on the basis of which it was predicted then that we would see the largest deficit on record. It tips our national debt – the total owed by the Dominion government alone, not including the provincial and municipal debts – over the trillion dollar mark.

Last Wednesday morning, on the day on which Morneau was scheduled to give this fiscal update or “snapshot” as he called it to Parliament, Captain Airhead patted himself and the government on the back over this by saying “We took on debt so Canadians wouldn’t have to.” There are really only two ways in which this remark can be understood. It is possible that Captain Airhead is himself too stupid to realize that the Canadian government cannot prevent Canadians from going into debt by taking on debt itself because all debt owed by the Canadian government must ultimately be paid by the Canadians who pay for that government with their taxes. Given that this is the man who infamously said that “the budget will balance itself” this is very much a possibility. The other option is that he thinks Canadians are so stupid that we won’t realize this and will adore and applaud him for “saving” us from all this debt.

The point is so obvious that even the Communist Party of Canada proved capable of grasping it and deviated from their long-standing record of being wrong about everything all of the time. In the Marxist-Leninist Weekly for July 11th, they said the following:

Clearly the Prime Minister thinks Canadians have no intelligence; that they cannot see through his unfortunate obsession with the word "we."

The debt the government "we" has taken on is to the richest and most powerful institutions within the U.S.-led imperialist system of states. The people "we" will owe this money to private moneylenders and be forced to pay it back with interest. The interest rate the people "we" will be paying is also going up as one of the three major U.S. credit rating agencies, Fitch, recently downgraded Canada's credit rating from AAA to AA+, making borrowing more expensive.

The "we" who will be responsible for this new debt of $343.2 billion, driving the federal debt from $765 billion to $1.2 trillion in one year, is essentially Canadian working people.

Despite being framed in the obnoxious and long ago debunked Marxist paradigm of “class warfare” with all the accompanying rhetoric, the above quotation summarizes the situation quite accurately. That Fitch’s downgrading of Canada’s credit rating, based largely on the fact that the total national debt – again, for the federal government alone – now exceeds the annual Gross Domestic Product by about fifteen percent, which is larger than the percentage by which it was lower than the GDP even last year, will make the cost of this debt even greater is a point worth reiterating. The government has, so far, been brushing off this credit downgrade, even though it is the first such downgrade our country has received in decades and is also the first that a G7 country has received due to pandemic spending. If Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s follow Fitch, as many are predicting will happen, it will be much harder for the Liberals to dismiss.

The Grits maintain, of course, that all of this spending was necessary and in one sense they are right. It was the government – the provincial governments acting upon recommendations coming from the Dominion government – which put all those people out of work and closed all those businesses, bringing them to the verge of insolvency. It was the government that caused all that economic damage, not the pandemic. If the government is going to prevent people from operating their businesses and going to their jobs then it must undertake to support them, but this is entirely for the same reason that someone who throw a baseball through a shop window is required to compensate the store owner for the glass. The government would prefer it if we thought of the coronavirus as the villain that caused the economic damage and themselves as the heroes who came to our rescue but that is not the right way of looking at it at all. There was absolutely no need for a universal quarantine. This is true, not only because the virus produces only mild to no symptoms for the vast majority of people who contract it, and the complicating factors which place people at a higher risk have been known since the beginning of the pandemic making a strategy of specially protecting people with those factors – which was not done – the most rational course, and because inexpensive treatment that when applied early enough greatly reduces the threat of the virus has been available all along and, despite a mass media campaign against it for entirely political reasons, been clinically demonstrated to be effective, but also because this experiment in quarantining all of the healthy along with the sick expanded government powers and eliminated civil rights and liberties in ways that entered into Big Brother territory and created the moral requirement that the state pay for all the people it put out of work and the businesses it shut down at a time when this could only be done through massive deficit placing a huge debt burden on future generations.

While this has been a problem with governments around the globe in this period, due to the origin of the lockdown recommendations in the World Health Organization, a body dominated by the totalitarian state of Red China, in Canada, the Liberal Party, which has been engaged in an ongoing assault upon the institutions and traditions which secure the rights and freedoms of Canadians since at least the days of Mackenzie King, jumped on the pandemic as an opportunity to rid itself of Parliamentary accountability. Parliament was sent into a recess from which it never fully returned, and the Liberal government asked for the passing of an Emergency Measures Bill that would give them the powers to spend and tax at their own discretion for two years. Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, mercifully was on the ball and prevented this. The government did, however, obtain spending powers up until the fall. They have used those powers, to saddle us with a debt so large that we will be paying over $12 billion in interest alone on it per year for the foreseeable future, in order to buy back the popularity they had obviously lost when they were reduced to a minority status in last year’s Dominion election, by bribing Canadians with their own, not-yet-earned, money. This clearly demonstrates that the Opposition was right to prevent them from getting two years’ worth of these powers, that they should have fought harder to prevent them from even getting them for the spring and summer, and the desperate need for Parliament to resume in full session to keep this government in check.