Matthew Lau: We taxpayers are on the wrong side of the money flows

Recent stories about NDP politicians wasting everyone’s money call to mind an observation by philosopher David Berlinski, who in an essay titled “Losing Money” wrote that in addition to the distinction between men and women, “all human beings may be divided into two classes: There are those to whom money flows and those from whom it recedes.” He lamented, “I have always found myself squarely in the second camp, surrounded by others of life’s fiscal losers…”

Sharing his lament are Toronto residents, unhappy fiscal losers after Mayor Olivia Chow raised property taxes 19.6 per cent in three years. But who is in the first camp, to whom money flows? Typically, privileged friends of those controlling the purse strings. The Toronto Sun reports that in the past few years, city hall has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to a diversity and equity consulting firm whose founders have long, personal relationships to Michal Hay, one of Chow’s top staffers, and Ausma Malik, a left-wing Chow ally and one of her deputy mayors. The founders of the consulting firm are also founding advisors of a municipal activist group that supports Chow and Malik and attacks their opponents.

In the same way, in British Columbia the NDP government has made fiscal losers of the province’s taxpayers with significant increases to a wide range of taxes since coming to power nine years ago, while pushing the budget deficit to $13.8 billion. Many billions of dollars have receded from taxpayers. To whom has the money flowed? Among others, Premier David Eby himself, whose children are in highly subsidized and hard-to-get $10-a-day child care spots. Eby is not known to have done anything unethical to secure his family subsidized daycare but has brilliantly illustrated a key problem with his program: the main beneficiaries of these highly coveted government benefits are the privileged, not the poor.

The NDP government itself has admitted that securing one of the $10-a-day spaces is like “winning the lottery.” Many parents can hardly find child care at all. According to Statistics Canada, last year 67.7 per cent of British Columbia families using any form of child care said they had had difficulty finding it, up from 46.5 per cent in 2019. In a 2024 survey covering two low-income Vancouver neighbourhoods, survey respondents said, by a wide margin, that their most common child care arrangement was “parental care only.” More than 80 per cent of survey respondents had household income under $50,000. They paid for, but did not benefit from, heavily government-subsidized daycare.

Money receding from taxpayers and flowing to the privileged is a hallmark of big government, and not just when the NDP is in power. Last year, journalists at The Trillium found that 63 per cent of the $345 million the Ontario government spent through a round of “Skills Development Fund” grants went to organizations led by donors to the governing Progressive Conservative Party. The largest grant in that round, $14 million, went to a carpenters’ union that endorsed the PC Party and hosted a fundraiser that raised nearly $120,000 for the labour minister’s riding association.

How about the federal Liberal government? In 2024 an Auditor General report on Sustainable Development Technology Canada, a federal agency formed in 2001 to disburse funds to fight climate change, “found 90 cases that were connected to approval decisions, representing nearly $76 million in funding awarded to projects, where the foundation’s conflict-of-interest policies were not followed.” Earlier this year the ethics commissioner found that a deputy minister at the Department of National Defence broke conflict of interest rules to get her friend a government job. She defended herself by saying her efforts “were focused on advancing diversity and inclusion across the public service, an objective explicitly set for Deputy Ministers.”

The Liberal government also has a track record of heavily subsidizing organizations that push left-wing causes such as anti-Israel activism, exaggerated global warming scenarios, expanded government control of child care, and others. Such activists and others with privilege, to whom money flows under a big government regime, have a clear interest in keeping big spenders in power.

The rest of us — the fiscal losers from whom money recedes — should be interested in voting them out. It may be true that some people have a tendency to make money and others to lose it, but politicians should not be drawing the dividing line between the two groups.