I thinm if you asked ten relatively well-informed Canadians, you'd find 10 programs that aren't worth the money. One example is gun control. Billions of dollars are spent monitoring over two million of the most highly-vetted civilians in the country, but the RCMP doesn't even track the 443,000 people who have court-issued prohibition orders against them. There's room to save a lot of money there, while actually improving public safety. And that's just an example I can think of.

Once we've overhauled every program to make sure the spending is fixed, the tax increases needed to start running surpluses and building a sovereign wealth fund will be much smaller, and much easier to swallow, since it won't be wasted to anywhere near the same extent.