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Jesse Kline: Carney's fiscal update denies reality, gravity to save the whales

The spring economic statement might as well have been lifted from a 'Star Trek' script

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Modern Canadian budgets have become little more than an opportunity for the government to sell Canadians on how great a job it’s doing. But the Carney Liberals’ spring economic update, which was tabled on Tuesday, is so gravity-defying, it might as well have been lifted from a “Star Trek” script.

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In an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Geordi La Forge, the Enterprise’s chief engineer, finds himself in conversation with his predecessor, Montgomery (Scotty) Scott.

Jesse Kline: Carney's fiscal update denies reality, gravity to save the whales Back to video

“I told the captain I’d have this analysis done in an hour,” says La Forge.

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“How long will it really take?” asks Scotty.

“An hour,” replies La Forge, indignantly.

“Oh, you didn’t tell him how long it would really take, did ya?” asks Scotty. “Oh, laddie, you’ve got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.”

Scotty, you see, was well known for multiplying his repair estimates by a factor of four, yet always managed to complete them in time to save the ship.

The Carney Liberals seem to have taken his “miracle worker” lesson to heart, only instead of saving the ship, they’re gaslighting Canadians about how much water it’s taking on.

Even before the economic statement was released, Prime Minister Mark Carney was hinting at a better-than-expected deficit figure, which he chalked up to his party being “good fiscal managers.”

At a press conference on Tuesday, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne declared that, “Today, we’re restoring fiscal discipline.”

In the fiscal update, he claimed that, “In our first budget, we made responsible choices to reduce spending to save Canadian taxpayers $60 billion over five years.”

And when tabling his mini-budget in the House, he bragged that his government has reduced “our projected deficit for 2025-26 by more than $11 billion.”

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This is the talking point that was regurgitated by much of the media. But it’s misleading, at best.

It’s true that, thanks to increased tax revenue and an economy that’s performing better than expected, the $78.3-billion deficit predicted in budget 2025 was reduced to $60.6 billion.

That’s still far higher than the deficits former prime minister Justin Trudeau was running at the end of his tenure, but it’s also lower than it would have been if Carney was capable of showing even a modicum of fiscal restraint.

Rather than taking the slightly reduced deficit figure as a win, the government announced $37.5 billion in new spending over the next six years on Tuesday, meaning that the 2025-26 deficit will clock in at around $66.9 billion, rather than $60.6 billion.

For those keeping track, Ottawa has now announced $54 billion in new spending over the next six years since last year’s budget was tabled in November.

Nor does the government plan to return to balance in the foreseeable future: the spring economic statement predicts that Ottawa will still be running a $56-billion deficit by the end of the decade, up from an estimated $20 billion in budget 2024.

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Champagne calls this “spending less” so “we can invest more.” The reality, as anyone who can count to 10 can surely see, is that they’re just spending more. But because the balance sheet isn’t quite as bad as they told us it was going to be six months ago, they’re claiming to be miracle workers.

It’s not as though there isn’t any fat in the budget that could be trimmed. Ahead of the fiscal update, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre sent Carney a list of concrete ways to reduce spending, including scrapping the “$90-billion Alto rail project” and the “$742-million gun grab,” along with cutting the budget for consultants, the federal bureaucracy and foreign aid.

While the government did commit to “reduce spending on external management and other consulting by 20 per cent over the next three years,” not only did those other line items remain the same, the Liberals introduced a host of new spending commitments that the country can ill afford.

Such as $660 million over five years to “get more Canadians involved in sport” and $6 billion over five years to entice young people to enrol in skilled trades programs and bribe companies to take them on as apprentices.

There’s even a policy that very well could have been taken from the plot of “Star Trek IV“: $252.1 million over five years to save the whales, including over $18 million a year to “implement a regional noise monitoring and management program” to help protect killer whales.

As is usually the case, an argument could be made for all these programs. Canada performed poorly at the Winter Olympics. Far too many young people are getting degrees in gender studies and other disciplines that don’t lead to well-paying jobs, while the economy lacks tradespeople. And I’m sure there’s some reason why we should care about whales (other than preventing an alien probe from wreaking havoc on the climate in the year 2286).

But during a time of economic uncertainty and eye-watering deficits, we could surely do without costly programs to fund children’s sports or protect whale eardrums.

And encouraging people to enter the skilled trades is something that the market will take care of on its own. If governments wanted to help, they should reduce funding for post-secondary degrees that aren’t valued by employers, rather than bribing students to enter apprenticeship programs with $400 a week and a $5,000 “completion bonus.”

Despite claiming to be “Canada’s new government” in the economic update, the Carney Liberals have shown that, much like the Trudeau Liberals, they lack any sort of policy imagination, always hoping that throwing a few hundred million at this problem and a few billion at that will make them go away.

Yet the past decade has shown that no matter how much Ottawa spends, this country continues to go downhill. And all that borrowed money is only setting us up for more problems in the future.

This year, taxpayers will shell out $54 billion just to service this country’s ever-growing debt load, which is about as much as Ottawa spends on health care. By the 2030-31 fiscal year, that figure will rise to $80.9 billion, and that’s almost certainly a low-ball estimate.

Pretending as though this government is making “responsible choices” and “spending less” is nothing more than a work of fiction from a government that’s wholly incapable of getting its fiscal house in order.

National Post jkline@postmedia.comTwitter.com/accessd

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