Speakers Richard Canfield and Jason discuss Canadian fiscal policy and warn listeners that recent government signals amount to a three-to-five year warning to prepare financially. They urge building a "war chest"/stockpile and criticize government tax proposals (capital gains, principal residence exemption) and broad monetary policy (interest-rate manipulation and money printing causing inflation). The hosts give concrete anecdotes of perceived government waste—an overpaid public servant handling emails from bed, and costly, ill-conceived procurement/installation decisions on government construction projects—to illustrate mismanagement and argue for individual financial preparedness.
Chapters
We knew three years in advance to the day that the COVID pandemic was going to impact our ability to meet in person and everyone be forced into their houses, working from home, all this kind of crap. And we would need supplies like, oh, my God, toilet paper, because apparently everyone under the sun needed bazillion rolls of toilet paper in order to survive. We needed all these things and masks and face masks and blah, blah, blah. If we knew that in advance, three years, do you think we would have put a little bit of prevention and stockpiled a couple of things, slowly but surely built up a bit of a storage facility, a war chest to be able to navigate the thing that we knew was coming. The Canadian government just gave you a three to five year warning and all the crap that's going to happen economically in the country, and you need to build a fricking storage facility, a war chest to prevent or prepare for the crap that's going to happen. Like the announcements telling you, it's, it's. This is the equivalent of knowing that Covid was coming three years in advance today.
Oh, I love that. I love, I love that perspective. It's. You've been given a glimpse into a future that you can begin to prepare for now. And I, boy, you know, I can rant a little bit on this, and that's what I'm going to do. Like, I've said it many times, you know, I think that you would agree, like, I don't mind paying taxes. Like, I really don't. You know, when the roads are nice and the hospitals are, you know, taking great care of people and policing and, you know, fire services and infrastructure, someone's gotta pay for all that. That's just the truth. But what really just gets under my skin is when you've got governments that spend. Like, they've got Elon Musk's bank account, but none of his business sense. $486 billion, no budget, no plan, no spreadsheet. Not even what you and I would call napkin math. Just trust us, we'll figure it out. You know who else has said that? You want to know? Every other guy who's pitched a crypto idea from his mom's basement. That's the truth. And we, we address some of the issues, like capital gains reform. That irked me a lot because the, the government. The government basically flirted with taxing investments like their criminal activity. Like if you bought a rental property in 1998 for $60,000 and it's worth 2 million now, the bad guy, like, apparently, yeah.
Total jerk. I can't believe you did that to help put something together for your own retirement because a company wasn't going to take care of you anymore 100%.
And, and it's like.
And we've been manipulating interest rates and printing money so we've created a massive inflation problem for your future. So heaven forbid you should have done something 25 years ago to protect yourself against that rich.
Apparently making money without government involvement is offensive. And you'd think that the message was, you know, how dare you succeed independently. We're not finished bleeding you yet. And don't do, like, don't even get me started on the notion of a principal residence exemption. I mean, if they touch that, oh, my God.
Here's. You know, a lot of people, my clients and folks that know me, they know that I'm not, I'm not the biggest fan of the quote, unquote, the government. Right. It's not an. A specific area of the government. And it's not that I, in broad scopes, don't like the government or I don't like the people in it. We have a lot of amazing clients that are government employees. They work for the government. They are public servants. They've done great things and they try really hard. And I get that everyone needs work and they need a job, and it's all fine. However, here's where I do have a problem, because I've had exposure to blatant waste that, that, that I can, I've seen with my own eyes, and I can, I know that it happens. If I can see it in little increments, where is it happening in the large scale that we can't see? Well, Elon's proved that with Doge down in the United States and how much money they found on wasted things. And I'll just give you a couple of examples. So I'll give you a recent one and then I'll take you back a little bit before you and I met Jason to give you some examples. So first off, there's a lady I've been introduced to here that through a mutual friend locally in the Chilliwack area, connected to some, you know, external friends, not somebody I know a great deal, but I've met them as a government job. Great for her. That's fantastic. And I found out, you know, essentially during COVID her job was working, working from home. And she maintained working from home, which is fine, but she spent the bulk of that time in her bed watching television and Netflix. And all she did was review emails and clear out email inboxes. Not even responding to the emails. Not doing it for someone's business. She was just clearing out old emails. That was 100% of her job. And she was. She makes over $100,000 a year doing that. Doesn't seem to compute very well. And her biggest concern was that they were going to make her go back into an office. That was the biggest concern of her life. Hey, whatever works for you. I'm great that you were making a hundred thousand. Not sure if that was warranted or not, but that's effectively the result. Now let's rewind the tape a little bit and we'll go back to call it early 2000s. As a. As an electrician working in the city of edmonton, I had the privilege of working on a lot of really, really interesting large scale projects in edmonton, commercial projects on a lot of government buildings. I worked on a lot of schools, I worked on a lot of. In a variety of hospitals. In the city of edmonton, I had the unfortunate or fortunate pleasure to help rebuild and the construction of the edmonton women's maximum security prison in the west end of the city. And in all of those environments and there were others I saw blatant waste across the board. And I'll give you a perfect example. Working at the edmonton women's security prison at the time when they were restructuring it, they didn't have enough budget from the new construction budget that was provided, so they had to work from the renovation budget and the new construction. So they. They tore everything down from the old building, but they left a huge chunk of the slab floor where we would have needed to run a lot of conduit so that it could have been protected should anyone be able to escape. So because they left it, we couldn't do that. And everything had to be run overhead. And they made us break canadian electrical code because they wouldn't allow us to do certain things that are required in order to put pulled points and junction boxes, which would have meant access hatches in the ceiling. So they. They circumvented national rules because of how they manipulated the. The whole project. And then you'd have people fly out from ottawa to edmonton every two weeks. So we're paying for all that. They would sit in meetings all day to discuss things. Then they would have to go back and discuss in ottawa. Meanwhile, the job is moving forward. So then they would send change orders a week, two weeks later. But we've already two weeks farther ahead. We have to tear things out and go backwards instead of forwards. Because they can't make decisions. All of that goes on the taxpayer's dime. I'll give you two perfect examples. This is when the technology was still coming along. There's a 1 foot wide by 4 foot long fluorescent light fixture. It's hung from two little stems from the ceiling and it's in the control room at, at this particular venue. Well, originally it was going to be one of the very first, you know, electronically controlled fluorescent fixtures. We go many years ago where LEDs became popular, et cetera. And so you needed to run control wires to it. Well, they deleted the pipe and the wires because it got too expensive. But we still installed the fixture. Well, the fixture was $5,000. It took me and another, another electrician, a journeyman at the time, the better part of several hours to install it because we couldn't touch their touchscreens and the, and you know, the whole scenario. So it was a very precarious situation. So there was all that cost. And then the end result is it's just a light switch. It's a $5,000 regular light. And guess what? They'll never turn it on. You want to know why? Because the glare from the light, the way the touchscreen, the screens to manage and looking at all the prisoners are at an angle. The glare makes it so that they can't see what the prisoners are doing, so it'll never be used. And, and then right outside of that, above it, there's a $50,000 light fixture that is the size of, I don't know, it's probably 30ft in diameter and it's all put together in modular components and it's hung at a weird odd angle from aircraft cable. It took three days to install with four people. And you know what? They couldn't even buy that light fixture from a Canadian company to stimulate our own economy. So I have seen exactly how they view the spending of our dollars. And it's been proven to me that they can't be that I say they at the aggregate level, can't be trusted. You might have great individual people that can be trusted, but they're fighting against the machine that just doesn't care to look after our and manage and steward the money of the population of a nation in an appropriate manner.
Very well said and very, very concerning. And so in this video, you know, just to, to recap, I guess so we covered the. The Canadian government's new fiscal masterpiece. 486 billion in spending, zero budget. We've talked about how this isn't a plan. It's a warning. You heard me share that earlier. Because something important to take away. Whenever the government can't explain where the money's coming from, we've got a spoiler alert. It's you, it's your income, it's your gains, it's your property, it's your tax qualified plans. And we walk through some of that, you know, in terms of the bait and switch, shrinking carbon rebates, the ticking time bomb that is this plan, this stupid spending plan. And it's just the kind where you kind of close your eyes and you swing a bat and you hope you don't hit the middle class. And yet that's what always happens. And Rich, you and I know, we know full well some people hear all this and they're going to say, well, hey, that's just the way things are, okay? Blockbuster used to be the way movies were until somebody created Netflix. And given that this is going online, I think the financial Netflix is what we would call the infinite banking concept. And when you implement this process, you're, you're not just opting out of volatility, you're replacing chaos with contracts. That is so important because you get to be the one that's making new financial decisions, that's making the few financial decisions in your life, your family's life and within your business that don't depend on stock markets, tax bills, or whether the finance minister got a good night's sleep. And so we can't fix the government, but the truth is we can stop funding their damn dysfunction with our blind trust. Implement the infinite banking concept, or at minimum, at least investigate it. Understand the advantages of what it means to become your own banker. Because hoping for change isn't a strategy. Control is.
