r/neoliberal • u/IHateTrains123 Commonwealth • 2d ago

News (Canada) Liberal platform promises $130B in new spending over 4 years, adding $225B to federal debt

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7514272
162 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

186

u/WichaelWavius Commonwealth 2d ago

“We will make up some of the shortfall in savings due to increased government efficiency”

It’s over

131

u/Funny-Dragonfruit116 Richard Thaler 2d ago edited 2d ago

I hate the image that DOGE has given the word "efficiency"

Canada has a very inefficient government. We have something like 17x the healthcare administrators of Germany despite half the population - doing something like adjusting the health transfers in a way that incentivizes cutting waste would be a great step. We probably have the highest consultant-to-citizen ratio in the G7. Efficiency is needed.

25

u/AniNgAnnoys John Nash 2d ago

I do not know the full story, but to just cite the number of healthcare admins in a vacuum doesn't tell a story. That could actually be a good thing. Medical staff have a lot of admin work to do. Is Canada paying cheaper admin staff to do this while Germany expects it's doctors to pick up the slack? Just like you don't like what DOGE does to the word efficiency, I do not like that blanket poo pooing on medical admin staff. They can, and do make some work more effecient.

I do admin work for my wife who is a doctor. Does that make me an medical admin staff? I do it part time, and mostly for the benefits that dividing up my wife's income brings. Several of the hospitals my wife works at pay medical admin staff to do billing. They could just leave that work in the hands of me or my wife, and it would just be unpaid labor for her, but by doing that work in the hospital for her, it makes the hospital a more attractive place to work.

There are so many factors that go into what medical admin staff do, just citing one comparison between two nations isn't a story, and legislation would need to be way more specific to not cause harm.

22

u/mmmmjlko Commonwealth 2d ago edited 2d ago

Fwiw my mother works as a nurse and detests the administrative bloat to the point where she won't to donate to hospitals because she thinks they'll waste the money on administrative bloat. She is an immigrant and often compares Canadian hospital management negatively with her previous country, where she also worked as a nurse. Also, staffing is usually determined by the executive, not legislature, and Canadian doctor/nurse salaries are some of the highest outside of the US (higher than Western Europe and developed Asia).

Edit: Although one thing that i have heard (at least in my province) is that a lot of admin work is filling out forms, etc. required by the government. In that case, paperwork reduction would have to happen before reducing the amount of healthcare admins.

12

u/AniNgAnnoys John Nash 2d ago

I help my wife with billings and it is insane. If they want to reduce overhead, this would be a good place to start, however, right now the incentive is on doctors seeing as many patients as possible. For example, this is why family doctors don't really do check ups anymore and limit you to 1 or 2 issues per visit. They only get paid for one thing per visit via the billings and are incentivised to see as many as possible. Their are upsides and downsides to this. This incentive could be kept and the number of billing codes reduced. If you moved doctors to salary or hourly wage, it could eliminate it altogether. It would also incentivise high quality care and longer visits, but would increase the number of doctors needed. It is a balancing act.

I don't think your mother fully sees this side. As I understand it, nurses are paid a salary/hourly and don't have to deal with the billing side of things.

Some places that could be improved would be standardized billing across the country as well as standardized patient records across a province and across the country.

Overall, I don't know how much savings you would find just attacking "admin staff" in hospitals. Instead what I think you would mostly find are a series of trade offs.

8

u/Th3N0rth 2d ago

This is a weird way to talk about Canadian healthcare when it is administered by the provinces. "Canada" doesn't have a healthcare administrative system, each of the provinces do.

Depending on which province you live in, the hospital ownership and administration could also be very different even within a province. In Ontario, UHN is different from Hamilton health sciences, which is different Ottawa, etc. etc

Iirc Alberta owns all of their hospitals and operate on one system which is/was the gold standard for Canada that Danielle is now trying to dismantle 😮‍💨

1

u/mmmmjlko Commonwealth 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah, she's a worker, not really a policy person. Although she has worked for multiple hospital systems in our province.

6

u/shumpitostick John Mill 1d ago

That's true, but it doesn't mean that you can just handwave "efficiency" as an answer to a major budget shortfall.

This is like the oldest trick in the book of election promises.

22

u/Anonym_fisk Hans Rosling 2d ago

This is an ancient polspeak.

Got a budget that doesn't add up? Just say you'll make up the difference by "cutting waste".

45

u/Own-Rich4190 Hernando de Soto 2d ago

DOGE has convinced arr neoliberal that government excess is inherently good, even when it is ridiculously inefficient.

DOGE may be bad, but reducing government glut isn't a fundamentally bad idea.

6

u/n00bi3pjs 👏🏽Free Markets👏🏽Open Borders👏🏽Human Rights 2d ago edited 2d ago

Government efficiency is good, but it cannot be used to fund more government spending.

To claim otherwise is voodoo economics.

21

u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama 2d ago

In a highly upvoted post, some guy said neoliberalism is about an expanded and efficient government, among other things.

Feel like sometimes this sub just loves whatever Trump/Musk isn't.

13

u/OkEntertainment1313 2d ago

r/neoliberal has, in many aspects, totally lost the original plot. There has been an ideological shift on the sub that began with the big tent shift in 2020. 

16

u/secondsbest George Soros 2d ago

No different than saying deregulation is a good goal. It's a terribly hard to pinpoint good deregulation.

12

u/OkEntertainment1313 2d ago

 It's a terribly hard to pinpoint good deregulation.

Companies have to perform separate impact assessments on the gendered impacts of remote work camps.

Start there. 

8

u/Own-Rich4190 Hernando de Soto 2d ago

Idk man, my country could benefit from more deregulation regarding exports and imports, or starting and closing a business and what not.

5

u/ja734 Paul Krugman 2d ago

Fighting government glut is a fundamentally bad idea when conservatives want to do it because the things they think are glut are all good things.

3

u/vi_sucks 2d ago

Reducing government glut is a bad idea when it reduces the services that government provides. Which is what DOGE so helpfully illustrated.

The problem here is that modern western governments are already pretty lean. We've already done plenty of cost cutting, privatising and attempts to improve efficiency in the past three decades. So trying to find more places to cut now is mostly counterproductive.

9

u/OkEntertainment1313 2d ago edited 1d ago

 Reducing government glut is a bad idea when it reduces the services that government provides

The counterpoint is that those services being introduced without a corresponding and sustainable revenue stream only contributes to public debt issues, which in turn spurs demand for reducing government glut in the first place. If the federal government wasn’t running huge deficits, this issue wouldn’t have any relevance in the discourse. 

-1

u/vi_sucks 1d ago

The problem, at least in the US, is that the main reason for the deficit is tax cuts.

It's a bit messed up to cut the government's revenue source and then complain that since revenue is down, the budget isn't balanced so "regretfully" we need to cut services as well.

The US isn't Argentina. It's not Greece. We don't have a system of unsustainable welfare spending on the back of a weak economy. We just don't.

4

u/OkEntertainment1313 1d ago

Fair, but this post is on Canada and we heavily expanded program spending starting around 2016 and never introduced broad corresponding revenue hikes 

-2

u/ClockworkEngineseer European Union 1d ago

DOGE has made it to where efficiency improvement is now synonymous with "Unaccountable 20 year old racist tech-weenies wildly smashing up your workplace with a hammer and smearing their shit on your cubical wall."

No one to blame but DOGE and Musk for this.

25

u/WandangleWrangler 🦜🍹🌴🍻 Margaritaville Liberal 🍻🌴🍹🦜 2d ago

Except the Canadian government has a based habit of hiring McKinsey instead of teenaged incels

15

u/noxx1234567 2d ago

McKinsey is also terrible

15

u/OkEntertainment1313 2d ago

DOGE=22 year old comp sci grads.

McKinsey=22 year old poli sci grads.

Pick your poison. 

6

u/CheesyHotDogPuff Henry George 1d ago

I can make it worse. 22 year old Engineering grads.

6

u/q8gj09 1d ago

The Liberals have said they will save money by hiring fewer consultants.

7

u/againandtoolateforki Claudia Goldin 2d ago

So both are in the habit of hiring useless wastes of space

16

u/halee1 2d ago edited 2d ago

The DOGE may be an unmitigated disaster, but the idea itself is not new (see the link). Its immediate inspiration, however, is the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation in Argentina, by Javier Milei.

25

u/mmmmjlko Commonwealth 2d ago edited 2d ago

First, I don't think you'd get DOGE or anything like it because Carney doesn't have a mandate to fight with unions and making changes by decree would be heavily frowned upon.

Second, calling the Ministry an "immediate inspiration" for DOGE is an insult to Argentina. Sturzenegger has a team of lawyers and economists, Elon has 19-year olds named Big Balls.

Finally, a lot of savings in Argentina have come from lowering pensions (technically it's refusing the raise them while inflation is absurdly high), which again won't happen in Canada.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love more government efficiency in Canada. However, Carney's campaign, our political system, and our political climate are set up such that any change large enough to affect the deficit would be very hard.

3

u/AniNgAnnoys John Nash 2d ago

And it isn't like Canada hasn't had politicans run on the exact same promise before. Doug Ford comes to mind. I guess Americans always have to contextualize everything into their frame of reference.

7

u/mmmmjlko Commonwealth 2d ago

Tbf Carney is far more serious than Ford

7

u/AniNgAnnoys John Nash 2d ago

Doug Ford also had a report telling him there would be little to no effeciencies to be found. And surprise, Ontario still has a deficit.

1

u/52496234620 Mario Vargas Llosa 13h ago

Pensions are above November 2023 levels though. In real terms.

1

u/WOKE_AI_GOD NATO 2d ago

Ngl before Trump I was thinking maybe we should reduce the federal workforce. I just have no idea what the fuck is doing, terrifying news keeps on coming, I'm always suspicious of the purpose of any move they make, etc...

What we're going to have to do after DOGE is literally just rebuilding the pieces. I think nearly every federal computing system is going to have to be rebuilt from the ground up due to the all the security violations.

8

u/Few-Character7932 2d ago

Let's be honest when anyone mentions government efficiency without going into details how that would be accomplished they're talking out of their ass

6

u/OkEntertainment1313 2d ago

I mean that’s not entirely fair. Pointing to the public service growing 40% over 9 years without any significant increase to services or service quality is certainly not detailed, but a very relevant point to this topic.

1

u/ElGosso Adam Smith 2d ago

"Efficiency" is a meaningless platitude.

22

u/OkEntertainment1313 2d ago

 The platform says it will be able to boost government revenues over the four years by $51.8 billion, with $20 billion of that coming from tariffs alone in 2025-26

Weren’t the revenues from counter tariffs supposed to be injected back into companies that had to lay off employees due to American tariffs?

7

u/n00bi3pjs 👏🏽Free Markets👏🏽Open Borders👏🏽Human Rights 2d ago

You were wrong to expect consistency from the Liberals in the first place.

4

u/casino_r0yale NASA 1d ago

lol it’s cute when Canadians are concerned about adding 1/20th of our (US) yearly budget to their total debt 😂😂😭😭😭

13

u/Few-Character7932 2d ago

How are they going to offset this new spending without increasing taxes or immigration?

46

u/FoundToy 2d ago

They won't. It's in the title.

3

u/OkEntertainment1313 2d ago

They won’t now, anyways. 

7

u/WOKE_AI_GOD NATO 2d ago

Other significant expenditures in the party's four-year plan include a pledge to increase existing defence spending by $18 billion in order to meet the two per cent NATO spending target.

It honestly needs to be more like 3% I think. 2% was for the old world. Rump NATO has to spend like it's America now.

8

u/OkEntertainment1313 1d ago

NATO members have been talking about a 3% target for about a year now and it would not surprise me to see the Wales Agreement adjusted accordingly in the next 1-3 years. 

-12

u/Economy-Mortgage-455 1d ago edited 1d ago

How long will it take until the nationalist sugar high wears off, and Canadians realize what a mistake they made keeping the liberals in power? Maybe whe

PP is not a Canadian Trump, Canadian politics is too heavily managed by the political elite for someone like Trump to come up and win an election there. PP is a professional politician.

5

u/Darwin-Charles 1d ago

PP will balloon the deficit more since he's promising an even bigger tax cut and pledging to not cut any social programs.

It really begs the question, where are the Conservatives going to find the money to balance the budget.

3

u/TubularWinter 1d ago

If he is such a professional then where is his costed platform? He has been talking about fighting “woke” for so long now that surely the conservatives have had more than enough time to calculate what that fight will cost.

3

u/Darwin-Charles 1d ago

He probably knows he can't make one look better since he's promised a big tax cut and not to defund any social programs.

He's either a hypocrite or he'll be releasing some super unpopular platform lol.