'Very dark period in our country': Ex-Liberal MP Dan McTeague on Trudeau, 'Marxist' taxes and Canada's decline

Earlier this month the Liberal government put forward its 2024 budget, which includes billions in new spending and a deficit of nearly $40 billion.

With a focus on “fairness for every generation,” the budget centres around increasing housing supply, health care, a national pharmacare program, child care, loan forgiveness for students and a plan to increase taxes on capital gains on the “wealthiest 0.13%.”

Along with the recently announced budget, the carbon tax has been a contentious topic across the country. Most recently, the federal NDP party has appeared to shift its views on the tax.

KelownaNow Live sat down with Dan McTeague, the president of the Canadians for Affordable Energy, owner of the GasWizard website and former Liberal MP to talk about the budget, the carbon tax and what those big ticket items mean to Canadians.

McTeague said awareness about federal budgets has been growing in recent years, but he claimed that the Liberal government has not learned important lessons over their nine years in office.

“They haven't learned the lesson of ensuring that you have balanced budgets or budgets that are sustainable economically,” McTeague said.

“This one isn't, and it falls in a long line of missteps by a government that's driving the economy into the ground and likely getting the attention of bondholders, which of course (BC) is quite familiar with now, having had not one but two credit downgrades.”

McTeague called the new tax on capital gains – which the Liberals claimed would affect the 0.13% wealthiest people in Canada – a “game changer.”

During his discussion with KelownaNow, he said the June 25 implementation will likely have a negative effect on thousands of bondholders because “it's basically saying, if you want to invest money in Canada, don't. Because we're going to take it from you.”

“It's also telling anybody who does invest in Canada that legislation and benefits can change very quickly and will change quickly as long as this government continues to practise the old art of deficit spending and spending more than what we have, then finding cute ways to fleece everyone,” McTeague said.

He said this is not the message Canada should be sending to workers at a time when, he claimed, “we’re seeing productivity and labour crater to levels that will make Canada” lag behind countries in the next 25 to 30 years.

When KelownaNow asked how McTeague thinks the Liberal government can sell its plan to tax the rich to cover for deficits, he said it's because no one is holding the feds accountable.

“Organizations that I think have traditionally sort of looked at these as being another tax-and-spend budget are now quite alarmed by this one,” he said.

“I suspect that this is only going to accelerate and that we will get a lot more in terms of involvement from professional organizations and others who are going to pile on and say, this is bad for everyone, not just for the middle class, not just for the poor.”

He told KelownaNow that the federal government’s idea of taxing their way out of a problem or that they can impose taxes to make the rich pay is right “out of the Marxist playbook.”

He said the Liberal government should not be going after people who have invested, who have built themselves a “nest egg” or worked all their lives to retire to fix “an economy that has pretty much demonstrated all the signs of paralysis.”

“It looks like Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Singh, and those who support that budget, are all about ensuring that they squeeze the last living drop out of what was otherwise an enlightened economy and taking entrepreneurs and basically throwing them in the garbage,” he said.

He pointed to the debt many people are experiencing, high interest rates, the high costs of food, energy and housing and joblessness.

Host Jim Csek suggested that the high inflation rates were due to high interest rates and “reckless government spending” and asked how much of that is related to the carbon tax, the high energy prices and the government’s “reluctance to tap our resources.”

McTeague said it was in part due to the federal government, along with the Bank of Canada, inflating the money supply, something that began pre-COVID.

“They did this before. They were spending billions more than they were taking in. They were not taking a very precautionary approach to fiscal and monetary policy,” he said.

Referring to the carbon tax, McTeague said that once a government starts taxing something that already trickles down into every aspect of a society, it can be very “highly inflationary, very corrosive.”

“There isn't a single thing that we don't do that doesn't use diesel. Even your imaginary, loopy, renewables, mining, forestry, all of these things cannot be done without diesel,” he said.

“You start messing around with that kind of a product or gasoline, it naturally cascades throughout the economy.”

McTeague said he didn’t know what the solution would be but said something had to be done for this generation and the ones coming after.

“We have to have a serious adult discussion about the so-called climate emergency,” he explained.

“I say that because that's how they're predicating net zero, it's how they're basing all of these impositions on our standard of living and destroying a perfectly good nation and leaving it, not just with a very bleak outlook, but also with significant, substantial debt, which not just our children, our grandchildren are going to have to wrestle.”

He said Canadians are going to need both patience and resolve to get through this period.

He also suggested one solution would be for Canadians to vote differently in the next federal election.

“I'm going to say this very bluntly, Canadians voted NDP Liberal three times, federally. They're going to have to give an equal number of elections to get this thing right again, and to let someone else see if they can fix it,” he said.