The federal deficit will hit $343,000,000,000 this year mainly because of the support programs concerning the coronavirus pandemic.
"Some will criticize us on the cost of action," said Bill Morneau, the minister of finance, but “... without government action, millions of jobs would have been lost.”
There will be no criticism from this quarter of any of the programs which provide funding to people put out of work, or assistance for companies to keep operating and other efforts to support people whose work evaporated because of the pandemic.
Nor will there be any criticism for the extra one-time $500 payment the government provided to old age pensioners who receive the supplement to their old age security cheque. These are people living close to the line and they need every penny they can get. No, no problem with that.
However, there was little or no need for most of the other 6.7 million Canadians who draw old age pension cheques to get the $300 the government paid each of them this week. This amounted to more than $2,000,000,000 that the government should not have spent.
Maybe when you are already spending more than 340 billion dollars, you think, oh well, what’s another 2 billion. But, many Canadians don’t understand the need for the $300. Nor do they understand the point of paying out money to people who don’t need it.
It has been suggested that any senior who doesn’t want the $300 they should send it to the man who gave it to them. The problem with that is, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau likely wouldn’t understand the gesture. He’d likely view it the same way as his mother and his brother. They both accepted thousands of dollars in speaking fees from a charity.
One would have thought that members of the Trudeau family would be the last people who would be taking money from a charity. And this wasn’t just any charity, it was from the WE. The charity that was contracted by the government to administer the Canadian Student Service Grant (CSSG) program that was to give more than $900 million to post-secondary students for volunteer work.
The contract for WE was discussed and approved by the federal cabinet and in spite of being previously involved with WE, Prime Minister Trudeau did not recuse himself from the discussions.
The WE agreement was a sole-source contract; there were no tenders involved. And, apparently no other organization was even considered. Including the federal government itself, which has ample experience in handing out money to individuals.
The WE contract is somewhat like the Trudeau family’s visit a few years ago to the Caribbean Island owned by the Aga Ghan, in that the Prime Minister seems unaware of the political implications.
WE eventually withdrew from the contract, but it remains to be seen if the WE kerfuffle will have any impact on the prime minister’s popularity. He, like most Canadian government leaders, including Premier Dennis King, have been given full marks and much credit for they way they have handled the COVID-19 crisis.
With a deficit larger than any since the Second World War the government has called a halt to the special programs it has put in place. The programs, such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), which pays up to $2,000 per month, will end in early October. And unlike the jobs that CERB replaced, there are no unemployment benefits attached to the CERB payments. So a lot of people who are getting CERB money instead of a summer job will face the winter without any EI benefits.
For some the really tough times won’t come until the fall. And many of them will be forced to look to welfare payments to survive, a cost the provincial treasury may not have anticipated.
Alan Holman is a freelance journalist living in Charlottetown.
