EDITORIAL: Mark Carney and the magical fantasy budget

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Prime Minister Mark Carney appears to be dabbling in a very creative form of reverse-engineering budgeting.

The usual way governments go about balancing the books is by setting out their plans for the year, showing their spending priorities and outlining how they plan to raise enough money to cover all those items. Carney has yet to produce a budget.

He’s told us he will spend big on items such as a beefed-up military to reach a 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) target he announced at a NATO meeting last month. He told CNN at the time that would cost a cool $150 billion a year. He pledged an additional $89.3 billion to this year’s defence budget and vaguely committed an additional $50 billion to defence by way of development of critical minerals.

He vowed $5.4 billion in increased health spending, promised to add thousands of new doctors to the system and pledged $150 million more for the CBC.

Now he’s telling his ministers they must find “ambitious” savings. In a letter to cabinet this week, Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne told his colleagues to dig deep for savings.

“You will be expected to bring forward ambitious savings proposals to spend less on the day-to-day running of government, and invest more in building a strong, united Canadian economy,” he said.

This is a stunning spending epiphany for a cabinet that is, more or less, the same one that, under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, created a bloated civil service bureaucracy, while at the same time spending $21.6 billion a year on consultants.

According to a Fraser Institute report, the size of the federal public service increased more than 40% between 2014-15 and 2022-23. The parliamentary budget officer reports total compensation, adjusted for inflation, increased by nearly 37% between 2015-16 and 2021-22

And now they’re preaching restraint? We may need an intervention. They’re addicted to spending.

Carney may choose to do what former prime minister Jean Chretien did in the early 1990s and push the problem down to the provinces by cutting transfer payments to balance his own budget.

That won’t wash. This fantasy budget is all on Carney and his magical fiscal thinking.

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