Mulcair: Justin Trudeau is trying to buy votes with your money

Now it's so nice. I think so when I heard this, I think it's fantastic that we were bursting at the seams with money and we can just hand it out to Jackson. Give us a GSD vacation. So your thoughts, please. Don't let me color whatever you're going to say. Just use your own words.

We're pretty much on the same page here, Andrew, from what I just understood. This is a price tag of over $6 billion, this little announcement yesterday, and I'll divide it into two parts. I don't think that there's a family that's going to turn up their nose at the $250 that Trudeau says are going to be sent out in the spring. Everybody could use a break fair enough, but you have to look at the bigger picture.

So this money that's going to be shoveled out by the dollar, the $250 per family, if you're earning less than $150,000, that comes with a huge price tag of over $4.5 billion. The other one, the cut on the taxes of groceries for eight weeks, what's that going to do? OK.

As of December 14th, so what do you do like this weekend? You were planning on starting some of your Christmas shopping. What do you do? Do you hold off on it and, you know, to save a few bucks? What does it mean that he's taking the federal tax?

off wine and deer. Here in Quebec, what does that mean? Like look at the SAQ, I asked them the SAQ and they said obviously it doesn't apply to us because taxes are already incorporated and we're not going to start changing all our pricing. So that's the next question. What does this mean in terms of pure sheer bureaucracy for the average small business? Again,

People aren't opposed to getting a break on taxes. But it's a break for eight weeks. So that means that every single item in your store has to be reviewed. You have to redo your caches. And then eight weeks later, you've got to put everything back. And then you've got to try to make sure that you've got the dates, right? And you determine everything so you don't get hit, you know, bumped over the head by revenue Canada because you've got some part of it wrong. So it's a massive bureaucratic effort. And this type of thing is written on the edge of a napkin.

by political staffers in the Prime Minister's office saying, what can we announce to start getting out of trouble? Because this is not a thoughtful announcement. The same breathy tone, when he's talking like this, and Trudeau says, we're taking the tax off groceries, all groceries. I mean, this was a major announcement. And the other thing is,

You know, there's an immediate effect. We were expecting a 0.5. So a full half of percentage point drop in the Bank of Canada rate. Every economist in the country right now is saying that's not going to happen. Maximum 0.25. Maximum 1.25. Why? Because this is inflationary. Because you're just, you know, after Christmas, you're going to be pumping a lot of, you're going to be pumping 4.5 billion of cash into the economy that's going to get spent right away. A lot of people also point out the people at the lowest run of the latter.

uh... are not going to be getting this help and it's you know it's it's tied to people who have filed the taxes and paid taxes and that sort of thing so it does leave out a lot of people who are the media yeah and it is it's a hundred if it's it's it's two fifty per person at number household

So, yeah. For persons who filed their taxes. For persons who filed their taxes. Yeah, exactly. So it's actually a lot of money. Yeah. But the level, 150,000, that seems like somebody who makes $150,000 probably doesn't need the 250 bucks.

No, fair enough. But what happens is whenever you draw that line, and I remember when Legot drew his line, I was talking to two people who had good jobs, you know, they weren't senior executives, but their household income put them as one person put it to me.

Because my wife and I earned just over the limit to get the, it was 500 bucks the first time and then between four and six under the second time from ago, we're actually, we know we are subsidizing our two neighbors. You know, so there's always a problem with trying to draw that line, but nobody's going to feel sorry for anybody earning over 150 grand. We agree on that.

Yeah, it's just, I don't know, do you, do you think people will fall for this? I mean, before I said, not a leading question, not a leading question, I'm sorry. I think it's a vote buyer. I want to know what you think.

It's a it's a very it's the oldest trick in the book trying to buy people's votes with their own money. And it's exactly what the go did. And that's why it's so funny that it happened on the same day. Because yesterday we find out that the province really, really is in deep economic trouble. We're slashing government departments. I talked to a business person last night who's he's got an engineering firm.

He said it's awful what we're going through right now because we've got all these projects that have been approved and they're supposed to be flowing and that we've hired people as a consequence of that. And the Quebec government is just hitting the panic button and saying stop the spending, stop the spending. So they're bottom-line and their ability to pay everything that they've contracted for and they're supposed to be getting paid is completely affected by this. It's not just austerity we're going through in Quebec. It's panic.

You know hitting the stop button on just about everything mostly in health care. So we're gonna You think we're having problems with our health care sector now. Wait, did you see remember when Pauline? I was putting people on buses and shipping them to Vermont This is gonna be of that caliber. This is how bad what's going on? So on the same day when Quebec had this reckoning of the fact that you cannot print money and Quebec sent a

tens of billions overall and then at the same time reduced taxes because that's what Quebec did and then it's a train wreck. So Trudeau's doing the exact same thing. Why? Because he's also facing an election. So he wants to say, look at how I'm thinking of you, but ask anybody in the business world, the papers today, I went through the whole shot across the country. And like every economist who's looking at this and even people who work in the sector where, you know,

food banks and the like saying, this is not helping the people who need to help the most. So it's perhaps going to be popular with a certain tranche. Is it going to get them a single vote? Honestly, I don't think not one vote. People are just saying, OK, this is more proof. This guy doesn't know how to count. And we've got to get rid of them. So the checks go out sometime, I guess, in the next couple of weeks. But the Canada Post is on. No, this is, well, first of all, Canada Post. But no, no, the checks wouldn't go out for a while, more like

the late winter release and roll of april ok so ok so canada post is not on strike but the rest right now it's interesting what it's not what are we doing about uh... the canada post strike because i we hear that uh... the passport people are holding back on the mailing out eighty five thousand passports and that's when you need your passport you need your passport and also i just got a note from uh... someone i know who runs a charity

And he says he has three and a half million dollars worth of checks to mail out to 150 charitable organizations, like homelessness, mental health, Christmas, food, baskets, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you all apply this with hundreds of fundraising funds across the country. So, you know, people are going to suffer as a result of this. But again, this is bad management. No.

Canada Post is a standalone. It's no longer a ministry. That's fair enough. But at some point, it still is the government. It's in charge of keeping the thing afloat. And yes, there are tough times because people don't use the mail nearly as much anymore. Everything's done online, except doing things like securely mailing out passports. So why was no thought given to this prior to the strike? Why was nobody

saying, oh, well, we can use private delivery services, and we'll cherish the extra 20 bucks to people to get their passports, which I'm sure they would gladly pay. But again, this is an indication of rotten management within the government. You'll forget the high-fat sounding stuff. Forget about the groceries. This is just, OK, do you guys know how to manage anything? The strikes are part of life when you've got a nice sector.

But the good news is we're getting indications that things are starting to progress. It was a mediator. They're not in the stage yet of compulsory binding arbitration. Looks like they might be able to actually come to a deal. So let's keep our fingers crossed for that. But it couldn't come at a worse time, which is, of course, why the unions are doing it now.

Oh, by the way, I just got a note here that Pierre Polyev is going to be on with Elias Macos at after 9.30 in this morning. Oh, nice. Yeah, so. I'm going to be sure to listen in because I'm going to be interested in seeing his take up. My guess is he's going to have a good critique of the overall portrait. He's going to be careful not to get cornered, saying, and don't send those jacks because obviously that would play against him.