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Matthew Lau: Carney accelerates Canada's fiscal collapse

The Liberals keep spending more, while claiming to spend less

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To get straight to the point about the federal government’s spring economic update: the Liberals are spending even more of our money than they previously estimated. This fiscal year, program spending is now expected to be $536.2 billion, which is $7.6 billion higher than in the fall budget. The new spending projections for the following year are also higher than in the fall budget, and the same for the year after that, and even the year after that. All told, the Liberals’ economic update raises program spending by a cumulative $25 billion over four years versus their fall budget and they now propose to push spending to $575.4 billion by 2029-30.

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In fact, the final bill will likely be much higher, because the Liberals tend to revise their expense projections upward — sometimes dramatically so — with each fiscal update. Case in point: the $536.2 billion program spending now expected in 2026-27 is not only $7.6 billion over budget, it is $25.8 billion higher than the projection for 2026-27 in........

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