Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for inviting me to appear before the finance committee concerning the most momentous budget to be delivered in modern times in Canada at the federal level.
Here are my three disclosures: First, I do not consult to anyone anywhere. Second, I do not belong to or donate to any political organization or party anywhere. Third, I am not here speaking to you tonight to seek funding or help for anything or anybody anywhere.
Over the next couple of months, I think an extraordinary number of people will appear before this committee, beseeching you for grants, loans, subsidies, stimuli and other forms of financial assistance, and many will claim very dire outcomes consequent to any denial of funding.
Over the last three years, through meticulous, extensive review of Canadian statistical data collected and published by Statistics Canada, CIHI, the Treasury Board main estimates, the Treasury Board Secretariat, public accounts, the Office of the Auditor General, PBO studies and similar government-sourced studies, I slowly developed a PowerPoint deck of graphs, charts and tables sourced exclusively from Government of Canada departmental publication sources. I called my presentation “Enduring Urban Legends of Canada”. I will not be presenting it now. I'm just going to run over some of the findings and summarize them very quickly.
We have been told many times—daily, weekly—that inequality is exploding in Canada, yet the recent OECD data shows that Canada is below the OECD average for inequality. Indeed, in a speech by the new Governor of the Bank of Canada in September 2020, the inequality graph was reproduced and specifically cited by the governor. In that same speech, the governor provided StatsCan data that showed that the share of top income earners peaked in 2006 and has declined since—not increased since, as we are told regularly. Indeed, Professor Stephen Gordon of Université Laval has published a number of op-eds in The Globe and Mail, National Post and Maclean’s showing that the middle class has not vanished or collapsed, but is thriving.
I reproduced, in my slide deck, graphs by the OECD from 2017, 2019 and 2020 that showed that Canada has improved over the past decade in reducing inequalities in well-being. Indeed, we are at the very top; we are in the top two, three or five countries out of the 34 wealthiest countries in the world, which is what the OECD is. The OECD data shows, in fact, that Canada is number two—which means in the world—for gains and well-being.
A second oft-repeated claim is that poverty is skyrocketing ever upward in Canada. In fact, Statistics Canada shows that poverty has declined from 25% in the 1960s—when I was a child growing up on a farm in eastern Ontario—to 15% below the poverty line in the mid-1990s to under 10% today. Indeed, ESDC—which, of course, is the Government of Canada—showed in its publication on poverty that the percentage of low-income Canadians has declined dramatically from 1976 to the present.
Moreover, contrary to repeated claims of increasing levels of elder poverty, elder poverty has collapsed since the mid-1960s with the introduction of OAS, CPP, GIS and public health care by the Lester Pearson government. Today, elder poverty is in the lower third of the OECD countries. It should be no surprise to parliamentarians because the Statistics Canada classification of functions of government by consolidated government component shows that the federal and provincial governments in Canada, in aggregate, spent $185 billion in 2018, and that was only on income support programs. In fact, immediately prior to COVID in January 2020, the two levels of government, federal and provincial, spent $200 billion on income support alone.
Stats Canada notes that almost two-thirds of the $750 billion spent by all levels of government in 2018 was directed towards “social protection, health care and education”, and spending on social protection grew at 5.4%—at the fastest pace—which is well above inflation. In other words, pre-COVID, in 2018, we were collectively spending almost half a trillion dollars on social health and education in a country with a less than $2-trillion GDP at that time. That's 25% of GDP.
My urban legends slides also address the claim that a large number of Canadians are deeply indebted and in a desperate financial position, individually on the edge of bankruptcy as we're told. It's claimed that we owe $2 trillion in debt. We do, but it's never disclosed that Canadians own $13 trillion personally for a net worth, per Stats Canada, of over $300,000 per person in 2020. No doubt I'll be accused of wanting to ignore the plight of the poor, but it is precisely the opposite. Large numbers of Canadians live very well indeed. The CRA income stats and the Stats Canada inequality index clearly show that Canada is an extraordinarily prosperous country for most of us. However, there are some Canadians who are left behind, and this fact calls for targeted surgical policies, programs, and spending to zero in like a laser beam to help those who do need help. I urge parliamentarians to avoid at all costs the demand from high-income privileged professionals for universal social programs, people like me, professors, public servants, and medical doctors, who are seeking to obtain free drugs and/or free day care to be paid for with scarce public resources when they need to be focused on our low-income people who need help.
Thank you.
