As it turns out, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may not be able to spend Canada rich by going into massive public debt to stimulate the economy.

One indication is that Canadians eligible for Trudeau’s enhanced child care benefit say they plan to spend only 15% of the money on consumer goods and services, while using 80% to pay bills, pay down debt, or increase their savings.

This according to a Bloomberg-Nanos Research Group poll of 1,000 Canadians conducted from Aug. 22 to 25.

The poll also suggests Trudeau’s middle class tax cut, touted by the Liberals as a way to help stimulate the economy, has barely been noticed by taxpayers and as such is unlikely to spur them to spend more money.

Indeed, the poll found 36% of Canadians surveyed say their income taxes have gone up in the past year, while only 8% say they’ve gone down. Forty-one precent say they’re unchanged.

To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with Canadians who are receiving the enhanced child care benefit using the money to pay their debts or save it.

Indeed, that’s a sensible thing for them to do in our tough economic times.

Ditto not running out and spending income tax cuts that Canadians don’t perceive have benefited them in terms of the overall state of their finances.

But the problem is the Trudeau government is paying for these programs by massively increasing Canada’s deficit and debt, meaning it’s all going to have to be paid back by all Canadians eventually, with interest.

During last year’s federal election, Trudeau assured Canadians Liberal campaign promises would be paid for with a series of “modest” deficits Trudeau pegged at $9.9 billion in 2016-17, $9.5 billion in 2017-18 and $5.7 billion in 2018-2019, followed by a surplus of $1 billion in 2019-2020.

But following the election, Trudeau almost tripled his projected 2016-17 deficit to $29.4 billion, followed by $29 billion in 2017-18, $22.8 billion in 2018-19, $17.7 billion in 2019-20 and $14.3 billion in 2020-21.

Far from achieving a balanced budget in 2019-20 as Trudeau said he would during the election, the Liberals no longer talk about when they plan to balance the federal budget.

Meanwhile, in the nine months the Trudeau government has been in power, Canada has been hit with a wave of bad economic news.

Statistics Canada recently reported the Canadian economy in the second quarter ending June 30 suffered its largest decline since the Great Recession of 2009, shrinking by 1.6%, worse than predicted.

Meanwhile, Canada’s trade deficit grew to an all-time high of $19.9 billion in the second quarter.

That came hard on the heels of news of the net loss of 31,200 full-time jobs in July, raising the national unemployment rate to 6.9%, the largest monthly drop in full-time employment in Canada since October 2011. It was also far worse than the 10,000 job gain economists had predicted.

Not all of this can be blamed on Trudeau.

Like Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper before him, Trudeau has no control over the collapse in global oil prices which negatively impact our economy, nor the wildfires in Fort McMurray this spring that significantly cut back production in Alberta’s oil sands, also cutting economic growth.

That said, if Trudeau’s big gamble on spending us rich fails, all Canadians will suffer.