Canada: Where Bureaucrats Rule

Canada would be a great place to live if the people had a choke-hold over government. Sadly, it's the other way around. For example, fish. With over a quarter of a million kilometers of coastline on three oceans, you'd think Canada would have fish. In fact Canada does have fish. Trouble is, it costs. It costs a lot. Two small pieces of sockeye salmon, eight to ten bucks. But that's only half of it. You already paid that much in Federal Government tax. Canada's Fisheries Administration spent $4.7 billion last year almost as much as the national fish harvest is worth. So first you paid for your fish in taxes at the rate of $45.00 a pound, then you paid about the same again at the supermarket fish counter. 

Which could make one wonder: do we need the luxury of so much government? For example, the Treasury Board Secretariat, which is said to provide "advice and support to ensure government spending is efficient, effective and aligned with priorities." Well nothing wrong with spending efficiently, which is to say spending that achieves maximum productivity with a minimum of wasted effort or expense. But at an annual cost of $9.3 billion, or around a thousand dollars per family of four, is this monitor of government efficiency itself efficient? The price of fish, when the cost of Fisheries Administration is taken into account, suggests not.

The case of the Treasury Board Secretariat indicates the need for a review of all Federal Government expenditure, which totalled $449 billion in 2024, an amount that exceeds revenue by $49 billion, thereby generating a yearly addition to public debt of a cool $1,225.00 for every man, woman and child. So yes, in addition to taxes to cover ongoing expenditures, a family of four is on the hook for the cost of servicing the additional $4,900 per person in Federal Government debt incurred just last year. But not to worry. The Feds will just add last year's debt to the $90,000 the Feds have already borrowed in the name of every living Canadian, including the old, the sick, the panhandlers, and the young, the babes in arms, and those remaining until their late 20s or early 30s in publicly funded so-called education. And yes, if you're in the work force, you're one of the noble minority shouldering the service cost of that monstrous debt. 

To some this may seem a time for tumbrils and guillotines. But for the most part, Canadians are not a sanguinary people, moreover a bloodless way to deal with a spendthrift elite is easily to be found. First, enact a balanced budget law. Second, eliminate the Canada Revenue Agency and the income tax. Third, triple the GST to 15%. The result?

Eliminating the income tax would save Government the $18 billion a year now spent on tax collection, but reduce revenue by $200 billion. This would spare citizens both the time and the misery of an annual tax filing, plus those hefty tax deductions from every pay cheque. As for the loss of Government revenue, it could be largely made up by raising the GST to 15% -- well below Europe's average rate of 21%, but delivering $96 billion a year in additional revenue. 

In accordance with these measures, annual government revenue would fall short of the current total by $84 billion. This however, would be offset by eliminating the Treasury Board Secretariat, for a yearly saving of $9.3 billion (For providing that so valuable advice, remember.). The remaining deficit of $75 billion could surely be eliminated by deleting, in addition to the Treasury Board Secretariat, a few other grotesquely expensive advisory bodies to whose advice, one suspects, no one pays the slightest attention.