Recently in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government narrowly passed its first budget, which projects a $78.3-billion deficit this fiscal year. That likely seems like a big number to most Canadians. But how big is it?

For starters, it’s almost double the $42.2-billion deficit the Justin Trudeau government planned to run this year and it’s far larger than the deficits Trudeau ran over the past three years, which were in the $35-billion to $62-billion range. In fact, setting aside the extraordinary pandemic years of 2020/21 and 2021/22, Carney’s deficit this year is larger than any Trudeau ran during his time in office, even though Trudeau was the highest-spending prime minister in Canadian history (on a per-person basis).

To find a non-pandemic federal deficit close to Carney’s deficit, we must go back to 2009/10 when Stephen Harper’s government responded to the global recession with........

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