LILLEY: With Carney's cuts, he's acting like a Conservative

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A few announcements from Mark Carney this week could have come straight from Pierre Poilievre’s mouth during the election campaign.

Firstly, the Carney government announced massive spending cuts across all departments that we should see by the fall budget, and secondly, Carney himself announced there would be a dramatic decrease in red tape and regulation to get the economy going.

There have been plenty of people saying Carney is governing as if he’s a Conservative. I haven’t been one of them so far, but with more moves like this, I might be inclined to agree.

“Canada’s new government has launched a review of federal regulations – to cut the red tape holding back our economy,” Carney posted on X Wednesday afternoon.

“It’s time to make government processes more effective so we can build the strongest economy in the G7.”

Those words sound like something you would hear from a Conservative politician, not the Liberals we’ve had governing us over the past decade.

The spending cuts that were leaked to media and then confirmed by officials in the office of Finance Minister Francois Philippe Champagne are significant.

A reduction in spending for the 2026-27 fiscal year of 7.5%, a reduction of 10% the year after, and 15% by fiscal year 2028-29. Spending reduction targets of that magnitude are ambitious, to say the least, and it will be interesting to see if the government can actually hit those targets.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer has already said it’s doable, but Canadians will notice and there will be job losses.

“This review will require difficult decisions affecting our workforce,” a memo sent to employees at Global Affairs Canada released earlier this week.

Given the increase in spending over the last decade under the Trudeau Liberals and the growth in the civil service, these cuts are clearly needed.

A report from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation shows that last year, the federal government had 98,986 more employees than they did when the Trudeau Liberals took over in 2016. It represents a 38% increase in the number of bureaucrats employed by the feds at a time when the population increased by less than 15% over the same eight years.

Spending on the other hand has gone up even more over the past 10 years.

Over their near decade in office, the Trudeau Liberal government increased the size of the bureaucracy by 38% and they increased spending between 2016 and 2024 by 75%. Inflation over that time was 25% and population growth was 15%, which shows that on both fronts the Trudeau Liberals had no control of the public purse.

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During the election campaign, Carney promised to invest more and spend less. During the brief Parliamentary session in May, Carney admitted spending was out of control.

“Day-to-day government spending, the government’s operating budget, has been growing by an unsustainable 9% every year. We will bring that rate down to 2%, less than half the average nominal rate of growth in the economy,” he said.

Still, these spending cuts, promises to cut regulations and warnings of job cuts are more than was discussed during the campaign. They also don’t appear to align with the Mark Carney we’ve seen in the past, or the one represented in his book Values.

Mark Carney may not be a Conservative but on these files, he’s acting like one, or at least a Chretien-era Liberal.

blilley@postmedia.com