Federal spending during pandemic is out of control

I gave up watching the Justin Trudeau show weeks back, unable to stomach one more episode of our PM, soon to be Canada’s Trillion-dollar Man, making Ellen Degeneres look like a miserable cheapskate with nothing better to dole out to her audiences than some lame cars and vacation trips.

It turns out I’ve been missing a giveaway show like no other, hosted by a former drama teacher tailor-made for the role and featuring the bottomless borrowing capacity of the nation.

COVID-19 has been a horror for many Canadians, especially those who’ve lost loved ones, jobs and businesses, but for a politician, especially one down on his luck, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

We’ve seen that with Premier Doug Ford. As recently as February, under siege from the teacher federations and stumbling from one crisis to the next, he was seen as out of his depth and doomed in the next election.

Three months later, even card-carrying Liberals are quietly expressing amazement at his metamorphosis into a take-charge leader with a heart, albeit one with a gruesome seniors’ home crisis on his hands. “Where the hell did this guy come from?” one mystified Windsor Liberal asked.

For Trudeau, the rebound is even more dramatic. After being pummelled last fall, with his majority of 2015 reduced to a shaky minority and his popularity tanking, he gave every appearance of having lost interest.

And now? He’s clearly having the time of his life, and why wouldn’t he?

He runs a government that never worried about deficits in the good times and is now in the enviable position of being pushed and prodded by Canadians, with little opposition, to dream up even more multibillion-dollar programs.

Team Trudeau has found its life’s calling: shovelling money out the door. And being hailed for it. Someone else, down the road, can worry about the torrents of red ink that will spill over the hip waders of our luckless grandchildren.

We’re preserving our today by drowning their future. Could there be any government more suited to that task?

Most economists agree the feds had no choice but to start dumping piles of money into the yawning economic vacuum created by its pandemic-triggered decision to bring the economy screeching to a halt.

But my God, won’t the Auditor-general, always on the hunt for spending horror stories, have fun with some of these back-of-a-beer coaster programs. It’s great that folks who’ve been hung out to dry overnight, without a paycheque, are getting help. It’s great that the economy is receiving a life-saving transfusion. But some of this stuff baffles this taxpayer.

Why on earth would the Trudeau government go out of its way to instruct civil servants not to red-flag, for future investigation, potentially hundreds of thousands of fraud cases involving the $2,000- a- month Canada Emergency Response Benefit?

Why would it send our money, in reality money borrowed from generations yet unborn, to people who voluntarily quit their jobs or were fired for just cause? Why would it send cheques to people in the country illegally or already deported?

What a dream situation for scammers, double-dippers, grifters and boondogglers.

Trudeau, of course, shrugged it all off with a smirk. And why not? It’s only money and there’s plenty more where that came from.

We’re shovelling cash into the hands of students so they won’t have to bother looking for work this summer. We’re sending cheques to reasonably comfortable seniors (thanks for the new lawn mower, Justin) and we’re topping up the bank accounts of working-at-home couples with young kids who are already saving serious money throughout this lockdown because they don’t have to pay for daycare and other expenses.

Canada is paying students $1,250- a-month to sit on their butts from May to August.

Imagine the hardship that will create for employers trying to reopen businesses following the shutdown. Earlier this month the premier of Nova Scotia was reduced to begging high school students to come and help process the lobster harvest.

Meanwhile, here in Essex County we’re treated to the annual spectacle of tens of thousands of hardworking Jamaicans and Mexicans being airlifted in as essential workers to harvest our crops while Canadians sit and watch Netflix and wait for the free money from Ottawa to roll in.

Gee. Ain’t the pandemic life grand?