Huge government debts mean Canada is robbing its kids
Before the pandemic, the combined federal and provincial Canadian debt totalled $1.4 trillion. And since then, this debt has rapidly grown, with governments borrowing another $300 billion in the current year alone. This debt will be mostly repaid by our children, their children and their children’s children.
This raises a moral matter of how we are treating our young and future Canadians. Is it ethical for governments to increase spending by placing greater debts on future generations?
Isn’t contractually placing our children into a monetary form of debt bondage morally indefensible? And how might we objectively judge government borrowing policies to ensure justice for future generations?
Golden Rule
One simple but clear standard used to judge fairness between generations is a variant of the Golden Rule, or treat others as you would like to be treated. The University of Ottawa’s Michael Wolfson, a public health professor and statistician, and other academics write that:
“One generation, when it becomes old and frail, should not expect to be treated any better by its children than it treated its parents’ generation in their old age.”
Intergenerational equity is the moral concept of fairness between generations. It’s been widely adopted by the environmental movement. The United Nations Brundtland report on sustainable development asserts that society “make development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Unfortunately, intergenerational inequity in Canada is worsening. The federal Liberal government’s recent throne speech previewed their upcoming spending priorities. More spending is targeted for national pharmacare, housing, green jobs and infrastructure, child care, business financing and wage subsidies. All this spending is only possible by much more borrowing.
Here are some statistics. Canada’s debt burden per child aged 0–14, is growing and now totals US$279,000, the seventh highest compared to 40 other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development nations.
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