Canada has a representative form of government. In theory, Members of Parliament, elected by secret ballot in 338 geographic districts are our meant to be our voices in Ottawa, deciding together on spending, policy direction and priorities. In a best-case scenario, those MPs and their appointed provincial counterparts in the Canadian Senate should be making decisions that a majority of Canadians would agree with . . . or at least would understand.

Why is it that so many of the decisions, being made by the Government (that is the 158 Liberal MPs and their 25 sycophantic supporters in the NDP) are so widely despised by a majority of Canadians today? Why are Canadians not rejoicing over the brutal clampdowns on public discourse or the economy-destroying initiatives of our elected elite?

Could it be that Canadian voters were so easily misled by the feel-good rhetoric of the socialists on the campaign trail that they could not read between the lines? Apparently, the massive propaganda pushed through public media, and paid for largely by taxpayers, was persuasive and found an easy mark in the generations shaped by an education system, that itself, was defined by the secular, socialist products of post-Christian thought.

It’s hard to look back far enough to be able to say where such thinking began to take root in Canada. It’s enough to say that it began decades ago and has been growing steadily and stealthily ever since. This shift in thinking . . . this departure from the self-reliance and independent attitude of former generations . . . has both resulted from and contributed to the inexorable growth of the government itself. As Barry Goldwater (a former US Senator) once said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.”

It’s easy to blame government for the things we want and don’t have, like money, housing, food and fuel . . . or for the things we have that we don’t want, like inflation, debt and censorship. But should government be trying to provide the necessities of life for its citizens? Is it the proper role of government to be the provider of jobs, groceries and transportation? When a government tries to fill a role for which it was never designed, it must fail in performing the duties for which it does bear the legitimate responsibility. Government cannot be both the servant of the people and the source of its material goods. In the end, it will fail to do either.

Governments are notoriously bad at running businesses. Civil servants are not entrepreneurs. The communal farms of the Soviet Union—managed by bureaucrats at the behest of corrupt politicians—were never able to feed the people of the Soviet Union. The monolithic state was unable to produce the same crops as were previously harvested by generations of hardworking families. And when there was a harvest, it was taken from those who grew it and allowed to rot in huge heaps. Some of this was deliberate and some of it was because the faceless bureaucracy was simply incapable of wise management of resources.

The Canadian Government (along with most provincial governments and many municipal governments) has outgrown its functional capacity. It has forgotten its core responsibilities and has expanded its reach into lanes in which it was never meant to operate. The massive debts accumulated by this overreach are hindering its ability to perform its basic tasks. The fiat currency it creates out of thin air is spent on pushing abortion around the globe, jet-setting the Prime Minister and his friends to climate conferences in Europe and to gay pride parades across the country. This government first imposes edicts that ruin businesses and eliminate jobs and then attempts to undo the damage by using money borrowed from future taxpayers to allow unemployed workers to stay unproductively at home.

This government wails about housing affordability, while it brings in hundreds of thousands of new immigrants who will all need housing, food, education and other services. They claim to be doing this to fill workplace shortages, ignoring the fact that Canada has killed over 4 million pre-born babies since 1980, the equivalent of 4,000 classrooms full of children every year. Those babies would today have been productive citizens, but we paid for them to be killed, and we pay for them to be replaced with immigrants (437,000 in 2022, along with over 600,000 non-permanent residents).

Ottawa needs not only a new government but a serious downsizing of government. We simply cannot afford the number of highly-paid civil servants, especially when so much of what is done by these government departments is either unnecessary or harmful. During the covid lockdowns and business closures of 2020-2022, while many Canadians suffered, 89 percent of federal executives were awarded bonuses. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation discovered that “around $200 million in bonuses were handed out to public servants [in 2022], despite performance goals having been met less than 60 per cent of the time.” During that same time, the Department of National Defence (one of the few essential departments of the federal government) saw budget cuts and a loss of personnel.

It’s time we put the brakes on. Stop the bleeding. Stop the handouts to corporations and bonuses to bureaucrats. Cut immigration levels to match housing availability. Cut departments and staffing levels. Balance the budget. Now. These are tough topics for politicians, but if we fail to rein in spending and reduce the bloated bureaucracy, Canada will face bankruptcy and Canadians will suffer more homelessness, even starvation. It happened in Russia. We need to learn from history.

CHP Canada is willing to address these difficult topics.