Gwyn Morgan: Turns out Justin Trudeau is more like Pierre than we feared

After inheriting Stephen Harper government’s zero-deficit balance sheet a little over two years ago, Trudeau’s budgeted 2017–18 deficit has rocketed to $18 billion

Like father, like son, the old adage goes. It’s rarely been truer than in the case of former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his son. Pierre was once asked for his views on democracy and communism, and stated that a one-party state would be the ideal government under certain conditions. That might sound familiar.

Added Pierre: “I wouldn’t be prepared to think I would be successful in arguing that (communism) for Canada at the present time. But such times might come, who knows?” Five decades later, here’s his son, Justin Trudeau: “You know, there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.”

Of course, the reason for that direct economic power is China’s command-and-control economy, wherein the government owns or controls the vast majority of businesses. For Trudeau the elder and Trudeau the younger, admiration of communism is seen in actions that diminish private-sector investment in favour of public spending, along with social policies that discourage or prohibit ways of thinking not aligned with their “progressive” beliefs.

During the 15 years that Pierre Trudeau was prime minister, federal spending rose from 30 to 53 per cent of GDP. Huge public spending overheated the economy, resulting in runaway inflation. By 1981, Canada’s prime lending rate had reached an incredible 22 per cent. The inability to meet skyrocketing interest payments caused widespread corporate and personal bankruptcies.

Justin Trudeau won’t admit that, like his dad, his ideology is one of tax-and-spend, anti-business and anti-Canada-oil

Accessing risk capital was virtually impossible when government bonds were yielding 19 per cent. By the time he retired in 1984, national debt had grown by 700 per cent and Canada’s international debt rating had collapsed. Canada was transformed from one of the financially strongest countries in the world into an economic basket case. It would be two decades before tough fiscal discipline was able to overcome compounding interest payments and begin to reduce the country’s real-dollar debt.

Five decades later, son Justin has Canada on a similar path. After inheriting the Stephen Harper government’s zero-deficit balance sheet a little over two years ago, Trudeau’s budgeted 2017–18 deficit has rocketed to $18 billion, with continuing deficits forecast to add $117 billion to the national debt by 2023. That’s reason enough to worry, but the picture is certain to get much worse. Why? For the same reason that Pierre Trudeau’s deficits spiralled out of control: the imposition of ideologically socialist government policies on a capitalist free-market economy.

full story at http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/gwyn-morgan-turns-out-justin-trudeau-is-more-like-pierre-than-we-feared