Opinion: Canadians are tired of Ottawa’s over-taxing and high spending

financialpost.com:

The Trudeau government is like a band that only knows one tune: more spending/higher taxes.

It recently imposed a capital gains tax hike. Part of the rationale was to reduce the debt burden on future Canadians. “Canada could finance these critical investments by taking on more debt, but that would place an unfair burden on younger generations,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said in announcing the increase. “Fiscal responsibility matters.”

But if the government is really worried about deficits and debt, couldn’t it cut wasteful spending instead? At the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, we commissioned a Leger poll asking Canadians that very question. The response was that 54 per cent of us prefer the government to cut spending, while only 23 per cent favour the capital gains tax increase. The rest were unsure.

That 54/23 breakdown means that among those who do have an opinion, 70 per cent of us — more than two to one — prefer reducing spending to increasing capital gains taxes.

Here’s where the government should cut:

If it wants the rich to pay more, start by making multinational corporations and their shareholders pay for their own factories. Instead, the feds have put taxpayers on the hook for about $30 billion in subsidies to big firms like Honda, Volkswagen, Stellantis and Northvolt. The government has also announced more than $600 million for the Ford Motor Company, $551 million for Umicore, $420 million for Algoma Steel, $110 million for Toyota, $372 million for Bombardier and $12 million for Loblaws, among others.

According to the Fraser Institute, federal corporate subsidies totaled $11.2 billion in 2022. That’s more than double what the government spent on corporate subsidies in 2015, even after accounting for