LILLEY: Mark Carney's spending plans make Justin Trudeau look like a tightfisted miser
The Liberal Leader's plan is to spend more, tax more and hope for better results – it's a bad plan
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Mark Carney’s spending plans, released in his Liberal campaign platform, make Justin Trudeau look like a tightfisted miser.
The plans Carney released Saturday would see the federal government dramatically increase spending and add a further $130 billion in deficit spending over four years.
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LILLEY: Mark Carney's spending plans make Justin Trudeau look like a tightfisted miser Back to video
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Instead of a $42 billion deficit this current fiscal year, the Carney plan would see a $62 billion deficit. Next year’s projected $31 billion deficit would be $60 billion. The $30 billion projected for the following year would be $55 billion and the projected $28 billion deficit for fiscal year 2028-29 would be $48 billion.
Of course, that’s only if the Liberals make their targets, which they haven’t done in years. They always have much higher deficits than even their own projections call for.
The fact is, the government only hits these numbers through vague calls for finding efficiencies, read spending cuts, hiking the fines and penalties levied by the Canada Revenue Agency on tax filers and by going after industry. Four times Carney’s plan calls for “big polluter” or “big emitters” to pay more.
His favourite example of a “big polluter” has been steel mills, one of the very industries he says we need to protect from Trump’s tariffs making companies uncompetitive. Meanwhile, Carney’s plan is to increase the industrial carbon tax on Canadian companies, which will hurt industry and cost Canadian jobs.
“These are very prudent numbers,” Carney said in announcing his platform.
Prudent? Carney must be working on a different definition of prudent because these numbers show he’s continuing with Trudeau’s runaway spending and taking it to the next level.
“Our plan gets government spending under control because the government has been spending too much, and Canada has been investing too little,” Carney said.
There is a lot that can be said about this plan, but it cannot be claimed with any credibility that it gets spending under control.
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Carney is clearly hoping Canadians simply look at his resume, the fact that he is an economist and the former Bank of Canada and Bank England governor, and believe he must know what he’s doing.
That would be a dangerous assumption. As has been pointed out, Donald Trump is surrounded by economists with degrees from places like Harvard and they are the ones advising him to pursue his tariff agenda.
Having an impressive resume doesn’t protect you from taking on bad ideas or policies. Carney has been telling Canadians he will get government spending under control and now he’s claiming that his plan does that when his own numbers show it will do the opposite.
Some of the spending is in needed areas, like defence, but how he will pay for it all is unclear. The plan budgets for $28 billion in budget savings but doesn’t say where the government will find those savings.
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As the Liberal Leader goes around claiming the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre will cut all kinds of government programs, this hole in Carney’s plan leaves him open to criticism.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has already accused Carney of adding to people’s anxiety with this undefined multi-billion dollar cut.
“That is the last thing we need,” Singh said.
As for the out-of-control spending, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said it’s par for the course with Carney.
“It shouldn’t come as a surprise, because it is consistent with Mark Carney’s record. Everywhere he goes, his advice leads to more money printing and debt,” Poilievre said.
Carney has been blamed for worsening Britain’s economic situation after Brexit by printing more money, leading to increased inflation. Despite his claim to have saved two economies from crisis, his track record is something different.
Franco Terrazzano, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, blasted Carney’s plan for spending even more than Justin Trudeau had planned on spending before he resigned.
“Carney claims he’s not like Trudeau and when it comes to the debt, here’s the truth: Carney’s plan is billions of dollars worse than Trudeau’s plan,” Terrazzano said.
When Chrystia Freeland resigned as Trudeau”s finance minister in December 2024, it was partly over a disagreement on how much the government was spending. Carney himself has said the Trudeau government spent too much and invested too little.
His plan is to spend more, tax more and hope for better results.
It’s a bad plan.
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