Canadian group urging Trudeau to adopt Trump’s DOGE initiative to curb wasteful government spending

12/06/2024 / By Laura Harris

The federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) has urged the federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to emulate the United States’ initiative to tackle wasteful government spending and a bloated bureaucracy.

In a column published for the Western Standard on Nov. 20, CTF Federal Director Franco Terrazzano wrote that Canada should establish an agency akin to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is expected to streamline government functions and cut unnecessary expenditures. Terrazzano believes such an agency would be essential to curbing “crazy” and wasteful government spending.

“This [DOGE] is the blueprint… All we need now is a prime minister with the guts to pick up the scissors,” Terrazzano wrote in his column.

Terrazzano cited several examples of government-funded research that, in his view, exemplified taxpayer waste. Among these were a CA$20,000 ($14,250) grant to a university student studying “Gender Politics in Peruvian Rock Music” and CA$105,000 ($74,800) for a project called “Cart-ography: tracking the birth, life and death of an urban grocery cart.”

Other eyebrow-raising expenditures included CA$17,500 ($12,500) for a project entitled “My Paw in Yours: Dead Pets and Transcendence of Species Divides in Experimental Art-Making Practice” and CA$50,000 ($35,600) for a scholarship exploring “Playing for Pleasure: The Affective Experience of Sexual and Erotic Video Games.”

Terrazzano also pointed out government expenditures in areas such as corporate welfare, a CA$25 billion ($17.8 billion) equalization scheme and taxpayer-funded media bailouts. He stressed that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation alone costs Canadians more than CA$1 billion ($713 million) annually.

“The bad news for taxpayers is we pay too much tax because the government wastes too much money. The list of wasteful spending in this article is far from exhaustive,” he wrote. “The good news is a champion of taxpayers could make massive cuts and barely anyone outside the Ottawa bubble would notice.”

So, he believes that the Canadian version of DOGE could play a critical role in addressing these issues. Terrazzano argued that a similar approach could deliver long-term savings for Canadian taxpayers while pushing back against the focus of the Trudeau administration on “anti-life and family” policies, including its pro-abortion, euthanasia and pro-LGBT agendas.

Trump: DOGE can save trillions of dollars in government spending

In the U.S., Trump appointed tech mogul Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to lead DOGE.

“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal agencies – Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement,” Trump announced on his Truth Social platform on Nov. 13. (Related: Trump taps Musk, Ramaswamy to lead Department of Government Efficiency that will focus on reducing government spending.)

However, Musk and Ramaswamy will only serve as advisory-only co-commissioners for the DOGE, with no executive powers.

In line with this, Trump envisions that DOGE can “save trillions of dollars” in government spending. The new department will work with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget to “drive large-scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach” to government.

Head over to Trump.news for more stories related to the incoming second Trump administration.

Watch this Nov. 9 episode of “The Tucker Carlson Show” as Carlson interviews Vivek Ramaswamy regarding what a second Trump administration means for the future of America’s bloated government bureaucracy.

This video is from the Sanivan channel on Brighteon.com.