Before Canada could send $23.5 billion to Ukraine. Before it could promise $81.8 billion in defence spending it may not be able to deliver. Before it could write blank checks to every crisis on every continent while its own roads crumbled, its own military rusted, and its own citizens got ticketed for taking the metro — someone had to break the financial foundation that made all of that reckless spending possible. That someone was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. And his son finished the job.
The Original Sin: 1968 to 1984 When Pierre Elliott Trudeau became Prime Minister in 1968, Canada was in a genuinely strong position. The economy was growing at nearly 6 percent annually. The country’s fiscal foundation was solid. The national debt was manageable. Canada had emerged from the postwar decades as one of the most resource-rich, economically dynamic countries in the Western world — a country that, had it been managed with discipline, could have built sovereign wealth, sovereign military capacity, and genuine independence from both American economic dependence and international financial markets. Net federal debt in fiscal 1968 was about $18 billion, or 26 percent of GDP. By Trudeau’s final year in office it had ballooned to $206 billion — at 46 percent of GDP, nearly twice as large relative to the economy. In 1984-85, total spending exceeded revenues by more than 50 percent. The deficit that year was nearly equal to 9 percent of GDP. Policy Options Under Pierre Trudeau’s full tenure from 1968 to 1984, federal debt increased by 738.7 percent. Canadian Taxpayers Federation 738 percent. Not a typo. Not inflation-adjusted away. The raw structural debt of the Canadian federal government increased by nearly eight times in sixteen years under one prime minister and one party. Pierre Trudeau increased per-person spending from $4,195 in 1967 to $7,474 in 1984 — while per-capita tax revenues steadily declined, ensuring a growing deficit crunch. By spending significantly more than the government collected in revenue, Pierre Trudeau recorded a budget deficit every year excluding a small surplus in 1969-70. Fraser Institute What did Canadians get for that explosion in debt? New social programs. Expanded government. A bilingual bureaucracy. Petro-Canada. The National Energy Program that gutted Western oil wealth and created regional alienation that has never fully healed. A constitutional repatriation that Quebec never signed. And an inflation crisis so severe that it reached more than 12 percent by 1981 and required double-digit interest rates to break — which triggered a recession. Fraser Institute What they did not get was a sovereign, financially independent Canada capable of funding its own defence, its own infrastructure, and its own institutions from a position of strength. What they got instead was a country structurally dependent on borrowed money — and on the goodwill of the banks and international institutions lending it.
The Hangover That Lasted a Generation The damage Pierre Trudeau inflicted on Canada’s finances did not end when he left office in 1984. It took more than a generation to pay for Trudeau père’s largess. Under Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, federal spending averaged 13 percent of GDP — years of deliberate austerity specifically designed to climb out of the hole the Liberals had dug. CBC News Every dollar of the $300 billion added to the national debt during the Mulroney Conservative years was interest on the debt the Liberals had left behind. Policy Options Read that carefully. The entire debt accumulation of the Mulroney government — a government that Liberals spent decades attacking as fiscally irresponsible — was simply the interest compounding on what Pierre Trudeau had borrowed. Canada was not spending new money recklessly under the Conservatives. It was paying the carrying cost of the Liberal credit card. The Chrétien and Martin years that followed were spent in painful program cuts, public service reductions, and transfer payment squeezes — years that Liberals now celebrate as fiscal responsibility but that were in reality the hangover from Pierre Trudeau’s spending binge. Jean Chrétien did not balance the budget because Liberals are naturally fiscally disciplined. He balanced it because the bond markets were threatening Canada’s credit rating and the IMF was circling. Canada came within a hair’s breadth of a sovereign debt crisis in the mid-1990s. Not because of Mulroney. Not because of external shocks. Because Pierre Trudeau spent sixteen years treating the federal treasury as a vehicle for political nation-building and charged it all to future generations.
The Son Picks Up Where the Father Left Off Increasing taxes, skyrocketing government debt, expanding regulations, soaring inflation and rising interest rates — these were the policy decisions that defined Pierre Trudeau’s tenure. Justin Trudeau repeated every single one of his father’s mistakes. Fraser Institute From 2018 to 2023, Justin Trudeau recorded the six highest levels of per-person spending in Canadian history — even after excluding emergency pandemic spending. That means the Trudeau government spent more per person during those six years than the federal government spent during the Great Depression, both world wars, and the height of the 2008-09 Global Financial Crisis. Fraser Institute After first being elected in 2015, Trudeau promised to balance the budget by 2019. He ran nine consecutive deficits, including an astonishing $61.9 billion deficit for 2023-24 — the largest deficit of any year outside of COVID. Fraser Institute When Justin Trudeau took office in 2015, Ottawa’s total gross debt was $1.03 trillion. It reached $1.8 trillion by 2022 and exceeded $2 trillion by 2025. Fraser Institute Two trillion dollars. Canada’s federal debt crossed two trillion dollars under the second Liberal Trudeau, just as it crossed two hundred billion under the first. Same party. Same pattern. Same ideology of spending beyond revenue and charging the difference to whoever comes next. The interest costs on that debt will hit $53.7 billion in 2024-25 — more than all revenue collected via the federal GST. Fraser Institute Canada is paying more in debt interest every year than it collects from its own national sales tax. That money does not go to roads. It does not go to the military. It does not go to healthcare or education or the CFTR students sitting at home with worthless truck driving credentials. It goes to bondholders. To banks. To international financial institutions. To the service cost of money borrowed decades ago by governments that spent it and left.
What Canada Could Have Been This is the part of the story that hurts most when you sit with it honestly. Canada is one of the most naturally wealthy countries in the world. The second largest landmass on earth. Vast oil and gas reserves. The world’s largest freshwater supply. Enormous mineral wealth. Agricultural capacity that feeds continents. Hydroelectric power so abundant that Quebec sells it to the United States at a discount while its roads fall apart. Norway found oil in the 1960s and created a sovereign wealth fund. Today that fund — the Government Pension Fund of Norway — holds over a trillion US dollars in assets. It generates returns that fund Norwegian public services, Norwegian infrastructure, Norwegian defence, Norwegian independence. Norway is a country of 5 million people. It made a different choice about what to do with its natural wealth. Canada made the Trudeau choice. Spend it. Borrow against it. Build programs that created political constituencies. Win elections with the programs. Leave the debt to compound. Repeat. Had Canada been managed with the discipline its resource wealth made possible, it could have built genuine financial independence. Instead the profligacy of the 1970s sent budgetary deficits spiralling out of control. Federal per-person spending doubled in real dollars between 1968 and 1985 while per capita tax revenues steadily declined. Policy Options A sovereign wealth fund. A modern military funded from domestic resources. Infrastructure that does not crumble after two winters. A truck driving program whose graduates actually get hired. Roads that survive a freeze-thaw cycle. A submarine fleet that works. All of that was possible. Norway proved it was possible. Canada chose differently. And the person who made that initial choice — who set the trajectory, who built the debt structure, who established the Liberal model of spend-now-borrow-always — was Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
The Ukraine Connection: Borrowed Money for Foreign Wars Here is where the full circle closes. Canada has committed over $23.5 billion to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion — including over $12 billion in direct financial support. Prime Minister of Canada Canada does not have $23.5 billion of surplus revenue sitting idle. Canada is running deficits. Canada’s federal debt is over $2 trillion. Canada’s interest payments exceed its GST revenue. Every dollar Canada sends to Ukraine is either borrowed money or money redirected from domestic needs — from roads that need fixing, from a military that needs rebuilding, from students who need their credentials to mean something, from communities that were told to park at Place Versailles and take the metro and got ticketed for believing it. This is the logical endpoint of the Trudeau financial model. A country so structurally accustomed to spending beyond its means that it can commit $23.5 billion to a foreign war while its own armed forces have one operational submarine and its own citizens navigate roads officially rated the worst in Canada. The money was never real. It was always borrowed. The question was only ever whose crisis it would be borrowed for. Pierre Trudeau borrowed it to build a bilingual bureaucracy and create political programs that bought Liberal majorities for a generation. Justin Trudeau borrowed it to fund everything from pandemic relief to carbon rebates to a spending record that exceeded both world wars on a per-person basis. Mark Carney is borrowing it to send armoured vehicles to Kyiv and promise defence spending targets that independent analysts say Canada cannot actually deliver on the timeline announced. Same party. Same model. Different recipients of the borrowed money. The Canadian taxpayer always the one left holding the compounding interest.
Why Do Canadians Keep Voting Liberal? This is the question that makes serious people shake their heads. And the answer is uncomfortable but honest. Because the Liberals are exceptional at one specific skill that has nothing to do with governance and everything to do with political survival: they know how to make Canadians feel good about themselves while spending their money. Pierre Trudeau gave Canadians a national identity narrative. Bilingualism. Multiculturalism. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The image of Canada as a progressive, humane, sophisticated alternative to American brashness. It felt like something. It cost billions. But it felt like something. Justin Trudeau updated that narrative for the social media era. Feminism. Climate leadership. Reconciliation. The sunny ways. The selfies. The image of Canada as the world’s conscience. It felt like something. It cost trillions. But it felt like something. Mark Carney is now selling the narrative of Canada standing firm against Trump. The scrappy middle power defending democracy. The country that will not be pushed around. Standing with Ukraine. Standing with NATO. Standing with principles. It feels like something. It will cost whatever is left to borrow. But it feels like something. Meanwhile the roads are breaking. The tunnel is unfinished. The military has one submarine. The licensing system was sold from the inside. The students who trusted the government’s programs cannot get hired. And the interest on the debt that funded all the feelings is eating more money every year than the entire national sales tax generates. Canadians keep voting Liberal because the Liberal Party has mastered the art of selling national identity as a substitute for national competence. Because the feelings are real even when the fiscal foundation underneath them is borrowed and eroding. Because the alternative — confronting how thoroughly two generations of Liberal governance have compromised Canada’s sovereign capacity to defend itself, fund itself, and deliver on its own promises — is genuinely uncomfortable. But comfortable is no longer an option. Canada currently has one operational submarine out of four. Only half of its maritime and land vehicles are operational. Atlantic Council Its fighter jets were built before most of its pilots were born. Its truck driving graduates cannot get hired. Its most iconic commercial lot had a driver ticketed for following government instructions. Its second largest province is burning federal transfer money on roads that do not last, tunnels that do not finish, and institutions that sell their own credentials. And the debt that made all of this possible — the debt that funds the Ukraine commitments and the defence announcements and the green city campaigns and the sustainable mobility agencies — that debt traces directly back to a decision made between 1968 and 1984 by a charismatic prime minister who convinced a generation of Canadians that spending money you do not have is the same thing as building a country. It is not. Canada is the proof.
SIIIOCULI — Intelligence. Sovereignty. Awareness. siiioculi.lilxbrxaker.com