A colleague lamented last week, on receiving his annual bonus, that he saw only 42 per cent of it. The other 58 per cent, though it departed his employer’s bank account, never reached his. Messrs. Trudeau and Ford intercepted it in the form of income taxes, provincial health taxes, and employment insurance and Canada Pension Plan premiums (this last of which the Trudeau government made more expensive for the fifth year in a row). Even the 42 per cent that finally did reach his bank account, my colleague groaned, is not all his. When he earns interest on that cash, Messrs. Trudeau and Ford take another cut of it, and when he withdraws the money and spends it, he’s taxed yet again. We live in a country, he concluded, that is severely overtaxed.

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What do we get for all the taxes we pay? Two core government functions are public safety and national defence, yet violent crime is rising and the military is severely underfunded. There are over 10,000 job vacancies in the Canadian Armed Forces, where morale is said to be the lowest in recent memory. The commander of the Royal Canadian Navy says it “faces some very serious challenges right now that could mean we fail to meet our force posture and readiness commitments in 2024 and beyond” and that “the air force and the army are facing similar challenges.”

Money not going to national defence is instead being poured into health care, but with little to show for it. The Fraser Institute’s annual national survey of physicians across 12 specialties finds the median wait time to receive medical treatment after referral by a general practitioner increased last year to 27.7 weeks. This delay of over half a year to receive medical treatment is the highest in the survey’s history and triple the 9.3-week median wait time 30 years ago. Compared to other developed countries with universal health-care systems, Canadians pay more and get less — the predictable result of government policy that aggressively shuts out the private sector.

Public schools are also a catastrophic shambles that keep costing more. The 2022 PISA results (for Programme for International Student Assessment), which measure student achievement among 15-year-olds in developed countries across the world, found the average math score in Ontario fell to 495, down from 513 in 2018. A 20-point decline represents roughly a year’s worth of schooling, which means Ontario’s 15-year-olds are about a year behind where they were four years ago. For years, PISA results have documented the declining quality of education, not only in Ontario, but across Canada, in math, reading, and science. The 2022 PISA scores for Canada as a whole were 497 in math, down from 512 in 2018 and from 532 in 2003. Test scores in reading and science, though their trend is not quite as disastrous as in math, are also marching alarmingly downward.

In addition to more expensive health care and schooling, the tax beating that Canadians are forced to endure has gone to fund Ottawa’s attempted takeover of the country’s childcare sector, with billions in new annual spending, expanded government control and — again — disastrous outcomes. Statistics Canada data show there were actually 117,900 fewer children in childcare in 2023 than in 2019. And despite lower childcare attendance, in every province a greater percentage of families using such care reported they had difficulty finding it.

The federal climate program is also increasing the tax assault. A spokesperson for Chrystia Freeland recently boasted “our government is making over $120 billion in historic investments to grow Canada’s clean economy.” Two weeks ago in Davos, the finance minister herself said the government is determined “that decarbonization for us will mean more jobs, more growth.” But this growth has yet to materialize, as in addition to childcare and climate, every one of the Trudeau government’s central planning initiatives has been a disaster. Canada is in a years-long crisis of economic stagnation. When it comes to business investment, “the numbers are really awful,” as the C.D. Howe Institute’s William Robson bluntly puts it.

Economic stagnation and declining productivity and investment should not be a surprise. What else would we expect in a country where, after putting in a year of hard work to earn a performance bonus, people see 58 per cent of it confiscated before it reaches their bank accounts and even more taken away when they try to spend the 42 per cent that does make it, all in aid of providing government services that are deteriorating markedly?

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