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TERRAZZANO: Carney continues Trudeau’s out-of-control spending 

Carney just released his main spending plan for the upcoming year and the numbers are bad for taxpayers

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Prime Minister Mark Carney is acting more like the college freshman who just cashed his first student loan cheque, rather than the bean-counting banker who knows how to save money.

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When he was campaigning to be the prime minister, Carney’s own platform acknowledged “the federal government has been spending too much.” Now that he’s prime minister, Carney is spending billions more than his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.

TERRAZZANO: Carney continues Trudeau’s out-of-control spending  Back to video

Carney just released his main spending plan for the upcoming year and the numbers are bad for taxpayers.

Those Main Estimates show Carney is increasing spending to about  $506 billion, which is $18 billion more than last year’s Main Estimates.

Carney’s new spending is layered on top of a pre-existing mountain of spending hikes.

The Main Estimates announced $258 billion in spending in 2017. Carney will spend 35% more in 2026, even after adjusting for inflation and population growth.

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Where is all the extra money going?

After the government doubled the debt over a decade, interest payments on the debt cost more than $1 billion per week. If interest charges were a department, it would be the third largest.

The federal government will spend more money on interest payments than it will spend through the Department of National Defence in 2026, according to the Main Estimates. And that’s after Carney massively increased the defence department’s budget.

The government’s own numbers herald former Liberal finance minister Paul Martin’s warnings about the dangers of debt.

“The debt and deficit are not inventions of ideology; they are facts of arithmetic,” Martin said in his 1995 budget speech. “The quicksand of compound interest is real.”

Debt interest charges cost taxpayers $21 billion a decade ago. Today, the bill is more than twice as high, and it’s growing fast. By 2030, interest payments on debt will cost $76 billion, consuming 13¢ of every dollar the government collects.

Federal spending and debt exploded in lockstep with the growth of the bureaucracy. Despite daily headlines about cuts in Ottawa, the federal bureaucracy continues to cost more money.

The cost of the bureaucracy increased 80% between 2015 and 2024. The Main Estimates show that Carney’s bureaucracy costs will increase by another 5% in 2026-27.

Not only are taxpayers paying way more for in-house government bureaucrats, but they’re also paying way more for outside participation.

Ottawa doubled its spending on consultants, contractors and outsourcing between 2015 and 2024.

Carney increases the cost

Carney promised during the election that his government would be “significantly reducing reliance on external consultants.” Despite that promise, Carney is increasing the cost of consultants, contractors and outsourcing to nearly $27 billion in 2026.

Carney is also increasing subsidies to businesses through Ottawa’s seven regional development agencies. This corporate welfare will cost taxpayers $1.9 billion – a 26% increase in one year.

Carney is also giving the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council an extra $80 million in 2026.

The $1 billion per year slush fund is supposed to fund research that provides “insights on the issues that matter most to Canadians.”

But it spent $105,000 “tracking the birth, life and death of an urban grocery cart.” It spent $20,000 studying “gender politics of Peruvian rock music,” $94,000 on a report about the “rhetoric of the selfie” and $24,500 trying to figure out how to advance gender equity and sustainable development through bicycles.

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The government is increasing funding for other notorious waste offenders, such as the Governor General’s Office and Parks Canada. Parliamentarians can’t even bother to find savings right under their noses. Both the House of Commons and the Senate will take more money from taxpayers in 2026.

Carney sold Canadians on the idea that, as a former banker, he would better manage Canada’s finances.

That means Carney will need to learn how to put down the credit card, because, right now, he’s borrowing billions more while debt interest spirals out of control. Franco Terrazzano is the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation 

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