EDITORIAL: Liberals fooling us twice on deficits

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It looks like the Mark Carney Liberals are gearing up to fool Canadians on deficits in 2025 — the same way the Justin Trudeau Liberals did in 2015.

Carney is promising a balanced budget by the end of his government’s first term in office, the same as Trudeau promised in the 2015 election that brought him to power.

In 2015, Trudeau told Canadians there would be three years of “modest” deficits followed by a balanced budget with small surplus in the fourth year.

He said those deficits would be $9.9 billion in 2016; $9.5 billion in 2017; $5.7 billion in 2018; and in 2019, the year before the pandemic hit, a $1-billion surplus.

Trudeau’s actual record was a $19-billion deficit in 2016; another $19 billion in 2017; a $14-billion deficit in 2018; and a whopping $39.4-billion deficit in 2019.

Flash forward to today — with the Trudeau Liberals never having produced a balanced budget in their decade in power and having blown their own deficit target of $40.1 billion for the 2023-24 fiscal year by 54% — coming in at $61.9 billion.

According to the Liberal platform released Saturday, Carney is promising to balance the budget after three years, but not in the way deficits are traditionally calculated.

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Rather, Carney says he will balance the government’s operating budget, which he says is running a $9-billion deficit in this fiscal year (2025-26), achieving a small surplus of $222 million in 2028-29.

However, the capital budget, which Carney renames as “investments,” will run huge deficits over the next four years — $62.3 billion in 2025-2026; $59.9 billion in 2026-27; $54.8 billion in 2027-28 and $47.8 billion in 2028-29.

The Carney Liberals say their platform is “fully costed,” but that’s what the Trudeau Liberals said in 2015, before blowing their deficits sky high.

A new survey done for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation — of 1,630 adults from April 11 to 13 by Leger — found 58% are skeptical about Carney delivering a balanced budget, rising to 65% when excluding those with no opinion on the issue.

That suggests most Canadians, when it comes to Liberal claims of balancing the budget, wisely subscribe to the old saying “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”