The Fraser Institute is deliberately misleading Canadians about the way our country works. Voters deserve better.

The Fraser Institute's "24 facts for voters" lays the bovine scatology on thick

In recent Canadian elections, there has been growing concern about misinformation, foreign interference, and attempts to deceive Canadians. For decades, the Fraser Institute - as well as various other think tanks - have issuing misleading reports with the purpose of manipulating public opinion. It’s what George Orwell called “political writing” - crafted to “provide the appearance of solidity to pure wind”

The function of these “think tanks” is to crank out misleading propaganda using cherry-picked data, deceptively presented, which are then presented as fact - as their latest “24 facts for 2024” was, in a column, by Conrad Black, originally published in the National Post, and which can then serve as talking points for Conservative politicians.

One of the techniques that is used, is “paltering” - which is carefully combining a string of technically true statements to convey a completely false impression.

Given the blatant misrepresentation it presents of the lives of Canadians, it needs to be challenged.

“With a better understanding of the impact of government policies, Canadians will be better able to hold politicians accountable and make informed decisions at the ballot box. With the calendar now turned to 2024, here are 24 facts for Canadians to consider.

Canada’s Economic Crisis

1. Average per-person incomes in Canada have stagnated from 2016 ($54,154) to 2022 ($55,863). Meanwhile, the United States has seen an increase from $65,792 to $73,565. The average Canadian now earns $17,700 less annually than the average American.”

   The Fraser Institute starts with three deceptions here - cherry-picking data; taking an average of people with massively different income concentrations for a meaningless average, and ignoring global events that drove crises.
   
   First, when it comes to income stagnation, in 2011, an economist determined that adjusted for inflation 99% of people living in Calgary and in Edmonton are no better off than they were in 1984. That was in the middle of the most recent energy boom, in a province that had one political party running it for over 40 years..
   
   When it comes to cherry-picking data, the second data point is in 2022 a year in which Canada was still in the middle of the pandemic, which was a global event - as was the collapse in the price of oil, which went from hovering at $120 a barrel for years, before collapsing in 2014, to actually being negative at the beginning of the pandemic.

   
   The word “average” is one of the most commonly abused words when it comes to deceiving voters, but it’s fairly simple to explain, which is that “average” does what governments and the market doesn’t: it imagines that in Canada, and in every other jurisdiction that it compares us to, that all income, taxes, and property ownership are perfectly equally divided among the population.

   It is odd, to say the least, that a libertarian think tank would hallucinate that every country in the world is some kind of communist fantasy.

   We need to talk about real “typical” families, not phony “average” ones.

   Using averages is deceptive because it misleads people into thinking that the Fraser Institute is summing up their situation, the accurate word to express the way way most people really live - the largest group of people making roughly the same income, is “typical”.
   
   Instead, the Fraser Institute uses “average” which means you take everyone - including the extremes - and you treat them as if they are all the same, by pooling all their income and splitting it evenly. That is a completely false picture of an economy where the majority make less than $100,000.

   It does not mean “what most people earn.” It takes what everyone earns - including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and divides it up equally.

   The U.S. is home to more billionaires than any other country in the world. This really does “pull up the average”.

   
   It’s Billionaire-in-a-bar logic: If you and your friends are out at small bar, and Bill Gates walks in, on average, everyone in the bar is a multi-billionaire. When he walks out again, that ends. The same thing is true of income: lumping you in with someone who makes more money doesn’t make you richer.

   2 Canada ranks just below Louisiana ($57,954) in average per-person income and slightly ahead Kentucky ($54,671). This is not exactly the bar Canadians should be aiming for.
   
   Again, this is a meaningless comparison, for the reasons above: it is based on averages, and the data is being cherry-picked. Louisiana has five billionaires, and so does Kentucky.
   
   3. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada will be the worst-performing advanced economy from 2020 to 2030 and from 2030 to 2060.
   
   No one should take an economic projection for more than 30 years from now seriously, and as Christine Lagarde noted, “economists are a tribal clique” and warned against their models as being useless.

   
   I’ll look at 4, 5 and 6 together.

2. Canada’s economic growth crisis is due in large part to the decline in business investment. Business investment per worker in Canada declined by 20 per cent since 2014, from $18,363 to $14,687.

3. In 2014, Canada invested about 79 cents per worker for every dollar invested in the United States—in 2021, investment was 55 cents for every U.S. dollar.

4. We’ve witnessed a massive flight of capital from Canada since 2014, to the tune of more than $285 billion.
   
   This is such a blatant case of cherry-picking, it is shameful. It takes investment at its 20-year peak (2014) and compares it to a year into the pandemic (2021).
   
   This is what the chart for investment looks like, and it’s all about one thing: the price of oil. In 2014, the price of oil had been at or above $120 a barrel for half a decade. In June, 2014 the price of oil hit $135.61 and started to plunge - while Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was still Prime Minister. That’s why all the capital flowed into Canada - and why it all flowed out again. It is all about the global price of oil.

   

   
   In fact, most of the collapse in investment occurred under the Conservatives, and it was steadily recovering upwards until the pandemic - when it resumed climbing again - driven by the global price of oil.

   

   Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart

5. From the onset of the COVID recession in February 2020 to June 2023, the number of government jobs across the country increased by 11.8 per cent compared to only 3.3 per cent in the private sector (including the self-employed).
   
   This is a perfect example of the ways in which the Fraser Institute is completely divorced from reality. The crisis of the pandemic was the single largest public health crisis in a century, and massive disruptions that occurred in order to prevent the complete collapse of the health care system, which nearly happened in several provinces.
   

Fiscal Crisis: Imprudent Spending and Massive Deficits

8. The Trudeau government has increased annual spending (not including interest payments on its debt) by nearly 75 per cent since 2014, from $256 billion in 2014-15 to a projected $453 billion in 2023-24.
   
   Here too, this is a pointless comparison, because after the 2008-09 financial crisis, the Harper Conservatives engaged in austerity budgets, cutting federal direct spending as well as transfers to provinces. The province of Manitoba had no increase in federal transfers in 6 years.
   
   The Harper Conservatives shrank the Federal Government to its smallest size as a share of GDP since the Depression. As a percentage of GDP, Military spending under Harper half what it was when Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister in the 1970s.
   
   During the pandemic, the Government of Canada’s interventions prevented a total collapse of the Canadian economy, and it was the federal government that did the heavy lifting. Over 80 cents on the dollar in relief was from the federal government.
   

9. With federal spending at nearly $11,500 per Canadian, the Trudeau government is on track to record the five highest levels of per-person spending in Canadian history.
   
   Again, this is a meaningless figure, because more than 60% of the federal budget is transfers to provincial governments and individuals.
   

10. A large portion of government spending in Canada goes to pay for the 4.1 million federal, provincial and local government employees. Government employees across Canada—including federal, provincial and municipal workers—are paid 31.3 per cent higher wages (on average) than workers in the private sector. Even after adjusting for differences (education, tenure, type of work, occupation, etc.) government employees are still paid 8.5 per cent higher wages.
    
    This is colossally misleading - which the statement half-concedes, by admitting that when you actually compare apples to apples in jobs (not comparing a fast-food worker to a brain surgeon) the difference is not 31.3% as first claimed, but 8.5%.
    
    That’s because for many jobs, there is no equivalent for in the private sector - like the justice system, health system, most of the education system, police, fire paramedic, emergency and safety inspectors, engineers, clean water experts.
    This is the first critical point. The Fraser Institute is lumping together all private sector jobs in one pot and all public sector jobs in another.
    
    One of the things that most people fail to recognize in the fundamental nature of government is that all three levels of government are involved in decisions that can affect whether people in their community get hurt or nor, or live or die. Health care, emergency services, police, health and safety and workplace regulations.
    
    That’s why the “business of government” is fundamentally different from most private businesses. When businesses fail, the harm is usually more contained. The reasons governments need to be robust is that when they fail, they fail the public - not just customers, or owners.
    
    The private sector in Canada generally pays people at the bottom less than public
    The people who make really astronomical pay in Canada - tens of millions of dollars per year - are in the private sector, not the public sector. The people at the executive level in in government generally make far less than their private counterparts - as they should, and the people in lower-paid positions tend to be paid more.
    

11. The Trudeau government has used large increases in borrowing and tax increases to finance this spending. Federal debt has ballooned to $1.9 trillion (2022-23) will reach a projected $2.4 trillion by 2027/28.
    
    Here again, this is a deeply deceptive, even in its phrasing - it makes it sound as if tax increases were large. The federal government cut income taxes and modestly raised others - which is part of being fiscally responsible.

    
    The Conservatives had left Canada with a “structural deficit” - by cutting taxes during the good times, so that when the bad times hit - because of the price of oil collapsing - there was nothing left in the coffers.
    
    The really significant borrowing was because of the pandemic, where the federal government stepped in to prevent the collapse of government finances and the economy as a whole. The pandemic was incredibly destructive and we clearly have yet to recover economically. Acting like nothing happened, or there is nothing to recover from after lasting damage to the structures of the economy and services, is denial.
    

12. Combined federal and provincial debt in Canada has nearly doubled from $1.18 trillion in 2007/08 (the year before the last recession) to a projected $2.18 trillion this year.

This chart is deceptive, notably because it combines all federal and provincial debt - that way you would see that about $450 billion of the federal debt was added by the Conservatives under Stephen Harper, after the Global Financial Crisis.

What it doesn’t show was an unexpected effect of the federal spending under Trudeau - which was that provinces started to balance their books or run surpluses, which Conservative Premiers used as an opportunity to cut taxes instead of improving services. A huge part of the reason for debt and deficits is that tax rates are much lower than they once were. Premiers who were on the way to a balanced budget or surplus chose to keep cutting taxes and keep borrowing. This is true in most provinces, including NDP-governed provinces.

I’ll answer 13 and 14 together.

Tax Increases and Canada’s Affordability Crisis

13. To pay for all this spending, the total tax bill for the average Canadian family was $48,199 or 45.3 per cent per cent of its income—more than what the average family spends on housing, food and clothing combined.

    

14. Housing and grocery costs dominated the news last year but in 2022 the average family spent $1,452 more on housing and $996 more on food while governments extracted an extra $4,566 from the average family in taxes.
    
    This is one of the Fraser Institute’s most shameful distortions, for the reason that they use “average” again - but with an even greater distortion, which is that they have added to the personal income taxes all the taxes paid by corporations, as well as capital gains tax whether they paid any or not.
    
    ”they attribute all taxes paid in Canada to individual families — including those paid by employers, corporations, and taxes paid on capital gains — their calculations treat families as having paid a good deal of their taxes out of income they are not treated as having received.”

    
    The argument for this is that everyone is ultimately paying for corporations’ taxes, but that’s not true - politically, economically or legally. There is a reason why corporations are considered persons under the law, and it is so they can be taxed.
    
    The claim that “you’re really paying these other taxes” just isn’t true. It’s used to claim that prices would be lower if taxes were. But is you cut taxes, companies can just keep charging the same price and increase profits. Not only are businesses under no obligation to “pass along the savings” in many cases, and in several jurisdictions, they are under a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value.

    
    In fact it’s the opposite: governments get more revenue when inflation is because prices are going up - and companies and top executives are making much more money.
    
    The other is that the Fraser Institute is looking at what the “sticker price” of a tax is, but not the effective tax rate - what people actually paid.

    
    This is what a study of what Canadians actually paid in taxes showed:

    
    Note, that they emphasize the typical Canadian family, not the average.

    

15. While the federal government has claimed it “cut taxes for middle-class Canadians everywhere,” in reality 86 per cent of middle-class families in Canada are paying higher income taxes under the government’s personal income tax changes. And that doesn’t account for carbon taxes, etc.
    
    There are two points here - first - when the Fraser Institute says 86% of middle class families - how do they define middle class, and where do they get the 86% number? Most carbon taxes are paid by people who are much higher income, and by energy companies, who have been making record profits.
    
    When the Fraser Institute complains about all the spending the federal government does, one of the the big new programs was the Canada Child Benefit, which is progressive, tax-free and has lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. Other programs coming up are a national dentistry program, and national pharmacare.
    

16. More than 60 per cent of lower-income families (those in the bottom 20 per cent of earners) in Canada now pay higher federal income taxes because of the federal government’s tax changes.
    
    At this point, I’m certainly not going to take their word for it.
    

17. Seventy-four per cent of Canadians surveyed believe the average family is being overtaxed by the federal, provincial and local governments.
    
    That is because the Fraser Institute has been making the same misleading claims about taxes for decades, being repeated uncritically.

Damaging Energy and Environment Policy

18. In the federal government, there’s a common belief that the Canadian economy is undergoing a fundamental and rapid transition towards “clean/green” industries. Yet despite massive regulations and subsidies, Statistics Canada data shows that Canada’s “green” economy amounts to only about 3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) and directly employs roughly 1.6 per cent of all jobs.

    
    This is copy-pasted from oil industry lobbyists, which is kind of funny. First, if you want to talk about subsidies, let us be honest about the fact that the oil industry has received enormous support from government over the decades. The research that helped make mining the Alberta oilsands possible was provided by the Liberal Federal Government of Pierre Trudeau.
    
    It’s not clear what “massive” regulations there are for the environment. Under the Harper Conservatives, environmental regulations dating back to confederation in 1867 were removed.
    
    When it comes to jobs and growth, the oil industry is pumping a lot more oil with a lot fewer people. Automation - self-driving trucks - have replaced six-figure driver jobs. The trajectory of the “green” economy is for growth, and there are good strategic reasons to do so.
    
    Energy security is critical, and overreliance on a single energy source - oil - is a vulnerablilty. It exposes the entire Canadian economy to greater shocks and volatility because of something global and international having a profound effect on our economy. This is about having a backup power supply.
    
    Second, there are real costs that come with the damage of burning trillions of tonnes of coal and oil for decades to the point that it changes the amount in the atmosphere so it becomes a better insulator We’re all having to pay the costs.
    
    And stop pretending the science is uncertain or new. We have been talking about climate change for a long time.
    

19. The recent United Nations climate change conference pushed for a "transition away from fossil fuels." Despite significant spending on “clean energy”, from 1995 to 2022, the amount of fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) consumed worldwide actually increased by nearly 59 per cent.

    
    There is one word for this: China. China’s economy and industrial capacity exploded as they massively expanded their energy capacity. It has absolutely nothing to do with Canadian policy.
    
    It’s also the case that Canada, under the PCs and Brian Mulroney and under the Liberals, continually led international efforts to fight for emissions reductions - agreements which were opposed and delayed by both the NDP and Conservatives, in and out of government.
    

20. Canada has an opportunity to serve the world with its energy and resources and, in doing so, benefit our allies and improve both world energy security and the environment. But the federal government doesn’t see it that way. How else could one explain the latest singling out of Canada’s oil and gas sector through an arbitrary cap on greenhouse gas emissions, even though the sector only represents 26 per cent of Canada’s total GHG emissions? Even if Canada eliminated all greenhouse gas emissions expected from the oil and gas sector in 2030, the reduction would equal only 0.004 per cent of global emissions while imposing huge costs.

    

    This is not a fact, it is a rant that includes imaginary scenarios. “Even if Canada eliminated all greenhouse gas emissions?” No one is talking about doing that. And it’s not clear because the text refers to 2030 and the graphic refers to 2050, twice.
    

    If so, the does the weight of $45-billion mean that is the total from 2024 to 2050? $1.8-billion a year for the next 26 years?
    
    Look, one of the reasons you agree to measures like this is to lead by example, because if you can’t ask other countries to follow suit unless you’re willing to do it yourself.
    

21. As a result of new federal energy efficiency regulations, the cost of a newly constructed home in Canada will increase by $55,000, on average, by 2030 because of the federal government’s stricter energy efficiency regulations for buildings. Rather than increasing the costs of new homes, governments should help close the gap between supply and demand.
    
    It’s would be worthwhile to know where this claim comes from, but this also seems like a consortium of corporate lobbyists came together.
    
    Some kind of evidence for this claim - tracking back to the original link to an industry website would be appreciated.
    
    However, opposing energy efficiency on the basis of cost is a classic “false economy,” because the short term savings in having a house that’s not well insulated is that it will cost you much more in energy bills. Building all new houses to that standard means that over time, we’ll be able to run houses at much lower cost.
    
    Why is the Fraser Institute pro-waste?

Our Failing Health-Care System

22. How good is our health-care system? Canada’s average health-care wait times hit 27.7 weeks in 2023—the longest ever recorded and nearly 200 per cent longer than the 9.3 weeks in 1993 when the Fraser Institute began tracking wait times.
    
    With a few exceptions, health care in Canada is a provincial responsibility. That includes funding for health care systems, as well as regulation, for everything from hospitals to public health.

    
    When it comes to Health Care, the Federal Government has direct responsibility for First Nations and Inuit, the military, and refugees.
    

23. Among a group of 30 high-income countries that have universally accessible health care, Canada spends the most money on health care as a percentage of GDP.
    
    Again, health care is run by provinces - and those provinces have overwhelmingly been conservatives who have cut and frozen health care provincially and federally, the last time they were in power.
    
    There’s another factor which comes with cost: without even seeing the list of 30 countries, my geography is good enough that I can tell you exactly what makes Canada unique. We are the only country on that list that shares a language and a border with the United States, which has the highest expenditures on health care in the world.

    
    All of the other countries are separated from each other either by language or geography. When you train in something as focused and specific as nursing or medicine, you generally do it in one language. That means language barriers in Europe. Other countries, are islands - the UK, Australia, New Zealand.
    

    That has real consequences when it comes to health professionals being able to move back and forth - so they can may pay them less. In Canada, we have a border where nurses and doctors can generally move back and forth, so we have to pay more to compete.
    

24. Despite this high spending, we are a poor performer. Among this group, Canada had the longest wait lists and ranked:

    • 28th (out of 30) for the number of doctors

    • 23rd (out of 29) for the number of hospital beds available

    • 23rd (out of 29) for the number of psychiatric beds available

    • 25th (out of 29) for the number of MRI machines

    • 26th (out of 30) for CT scanners
      
      Not one of these is a federal decision. Every single one of these is entirely provincial jurisdiction.
      
      On doctors: Provinces are constitutionally responsible for health care, including professional certification as well as funding for universities for the number of seats available in medical schools, for nursing, etc.
      In the 1980s, it was determined Canada had too many doctors, so univeristies scaled back class sizes, and left them there. Around 2000, people warned that a shortage was coming and that they needed to expand training again, but it was ignored by provincial governments, who did not fund the needed expansion of post-secondary medical training - and still haven’t.

    • The same criticism applies for hospital beds, psychiatric beds, MRI machines and CT scanners. These are all provincial jurisdiction, and as mentioned above, in the last years. provincial governments chose to borrow to pay for tax cuts - sometimes major tax cuts. Since 2016, BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec were all asking for more money for health care while they were running deficits and cutting taxes. They did so all while the current federal government restored equalization payments and introduced side health accords to increase health funding.
      At the federal level, the Harper Conservatives unilaterally slashed provincial health transfers from 6% a year to 3%, and froze Manitoba’s total transfers for six years straight. They also introduced a new funding formula that took $1-billion away from every other province and used it to increase Alberta’s transfers instead.

That’s it.

If you’re keeping score, most of these facts crumbled under scrutiny. That should not happen. Taken as a whole, these statements present of profoundly, provably false, and distorted picture of Canada, all while claiming to inform voters.

“Think tanks” were created in the 1970s to give a veneer of academic or intellectual credibility to far-right ideas, pushed by zealots, which aim to dismantle decades of economic and social progress, and undermine democracy and elected governments. The fact that Fraser Institute routinely picked Hong Kong - which is not a democracy - as the freest jurisdiction in the world - should tell you a lot about its priorities.

If the Fraser Institute really has a case to make for its policies, why can’t it be straight about it? Because they are operating in the public interest, rather as John Kenneth Galbraith said “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

• DFL