GUNTER: Liberals’ 2015 promises are hurting the middle class

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The Trudeau Liberals have failed Canada’s middle class.

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On taxes, housing, employment, economic growth, health care and income, ordinary working Canadians are worse off than they were in 2015 when the Liberals took over.

The latest proof came this week from Statistics Canada’s family income data.

On the surface, the numbers from the latest available year were not that bad: “In 2022, the median family after-tax income of Canadians was $60,800.” That was “up 2.5% from 2021, before adjusting for inflation.”

A 2.5% increase is nothing to get giddy over, but it’s not terrible, either.

But here’s the kicker: “Adjusted for the annual rate of inflation,” which was 6.8% that year, “the 2022 median family after-tax income was 4.0% lower than in 2021.”

The middle class slid backwards that year. And while inflation has since fallen back to nearer-normal levels, most Canadians’ pay raises have been small and nearly all of these tiny gains have been eaten up by rising prices.

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Middle-class Canadians have failed to get ahead since well before the pandemic.

This is a double failure because, if you recall, the Liberals ran in 2015 on being the champions of the middle class. Their campaign platform nine years ago was even called, “A New Plan for a Strong Middle Class.”

Needless to say that plan has backfired.

Campaign ads featuring now-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2015 touted taxing wealthy Canadians “just a little,” so the middle class could have more.

Put aside for a moment the unreality of the Liberal plan. There were never enough rich people in Canada to pay for all the Liberals’ grand spending dreams.

More importantly, though, the Trudeau government has shown itself to be economically illiterate and mathematically inept. Its ministers and senior public servants are administratively incompetent, too. As a colleague of mine once said, “They couldn’t organize flatulence at a bean dinner.”

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So during the Liberals’ tenure, middle-class income has been going nowhere fast.

Meanwhile, middle-class taxes have gone up and down.

Yes, the Trudeau government initially lowered some income taxes. However, at the same time it eliminated the children’s fitness tax credit, children’s arts tax credit, public transit tax credits and education and textbook tax credits. It also ended income-splitting for couples with young children. The net result was that about half of middle-class Canadians paid more tax under the Liberals right off the whip.

Since then, the government has also ended income-splitting for small business owners, created the expensive new carbon tax (then increased it every year), added a tax on luxury boats and cars, added a tax on so-called gas guzzlers and raised sin taxes on cigarettes and liquor.

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In addition, the Liberals have also raised contributions to the Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance and imposed a little-known second carbon tax called the clean fuel regulation.

In the past three years these non-income taxes have added about $800 in taxes for a family of four, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

All in, middle-class taxes in the Trudeau era have increased by as much as $1,600 a year, even after counting the government’s initial tax cuts.

Buying a home is beyond the ability of many in the big-city middle class and jobs are getting harder to find because of massive immigration and anti-investment economic policy.

As the cost of living has increased, our standard of living has decreased.

On top of all of this is an immigration boom that the Liberals refuse to control.

Officially, we added about 1.2 million new Canadians last year. Unofficially, when foreign students, asylum seekers and temporary workers are also counted, the actual total was nearer 2.3 million, all needing housing and health care, and many needing jobs. And we are already on a pace to exceed that in 2024.

For ordinary Canadians, Trudeau and his government have been a disaster.

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