Gerald Butts

speaker

1,669 appearances 11 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 15 Sep

Gerald Butts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge · Moore-Butts Conversation Encore Episode -- Is Affordability An Issue That Governments Can Even Solve? · 19 Aug 2026 podcast

I think that that's a problem.

And

Part of my advice, which is not the um

easiest thing to swallow is to get involved in politics and shape an agenda that works for you and your generation because the people who came before you sure did.

And that's partly why you're living downstream of all of these costs that um that people who are older than you didn't feel like absorbing.

Now it's time for you to make uh the country a better place for you and your your peers in the way that your predecessors

I think all that's true.

Yeah, if we brought in the question back out to the original one, Peter, which you just uh restated, how how what can governments do?

I think

I think broadly speaking there are two kinds of things governments in this country can do.

One is obviously you can um you can directly affect people's immediate costs through the tax system.

I think the Canada Child Benefit, for instance, which uh the Trudeau government that I was part of uh brought in in 2015 relieved a budding affordability crisis with young families.

It gave, you know, I'm old fashioned when it comes to this stuff, but I think one of the the main problem that poor and lower income people have is they don't have enough money.

So you have to figure out a way to get them more money.

And one thing we didn't think of at the time was just as we were bringing that in, the um this is an overstatement for a fact, but young Canadians would either stop having children or uh

Forego having children until much later in life.

So now the target audience that we were looking at for the Canada Child Benefit, for instance.

They don't benefit from it because they don't have children.

And there's no benefit out there for single people or for uh uh couples who don't have children.

And I think that's a public policy gap that um uh current policymakers, both at the federal and provincial level, would do well to look at.

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