Lorne Gunter: Carney taking lessons from Trump and it's bad for Canada's bottom line
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Consider for a minute Carney's refusal to have Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne bring down a budget until November or December. Rather than a budget and enabling legislation to authorize nearly half a trillion dollars in spending, Carney prefers to rule (and spend) by cabinet decree.
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Before April's election, parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux estimated the federal deficit for the current fiscal year would be just about $47 billion. That's bad enough, but a significant decrease from the $62-billion deficit that the Liberals had to admit to before Christmas for last year.
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But as Giroux pointed out at the time, his sum was only 'a baseline.' His number was only what the deficit would be before any of the political promises the winning party carried through on.
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Since the Liberals were re-elected, Giroux has estimated for reporters that the Carney government's campaign goodies would raise the 2025-26 deficit to between $60 billion and $70 billion 'in the absence of spending cuts elsewhere.' That, of course, is as bad or worse than last year's Liberal amount.
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Mark Carney intends for his government to spend more money than Justin Trudeau's, and without a budget or proper accountability to Parliament.
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But even Giroux's latest guestimate doesn't include measures the Carney Liberals have taken since the end of May without recourse to the House of Commons or a budget.
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Enter Toronto's C.D. Howe Institute.
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The non-partisan think tank calculates that with measures announced by the Liberals since the election (right up to the cancellation of the digital services tax last weekend), the deficit this year will be $92 billion in the current fiscal year, $75 billion next year, $73 billion the year after that and $71 billion in 2028-29.
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That's a total of $311 billion in extra public debt in just four years. It took the Trudeau government 10 years to add $600 billion. That's a rate of extra debt about 20 per cent faster than the rate built up by Justin Trudeau and his cabinets.
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You may take comfort in the fact that Carney is a former central banker and international financier. I don't. Canada already has a higher-than-average debt-to-GDP ratio for a developed nation. Carney's orgy of spending will only make it worse.
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