Doublespeak from Big Brother? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you
NP View: Liberal 'austerity'? Don't make us laugh
Although Prime Minister Mark Carney has degrees from Harvard and Oxford and experience running two central banks, his fiscal plan doesn’t appear to be taking a page out of the book of famed economists like Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes, but is instead adopting strategies outlined in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
On Wednesday,
Carney told reporters that the upcoming fall budget will be “an austerity and investment budget at the same time,” noting that, “We need to rein in spending, we need to find efficiencies … that create the room for these big investments.” The following day, his finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne,
said , “We’re going to spend less so we can invest more.”
Congratulations to anyone who realizes the government can’t be both austere and embark on a massive spending spree — you haven’t yet succumbed to Liberal “
doublethink .” What Carney is really saying is that Ottawa plans to focus on different priorities, cutting some areas in order to increase spending in others.
But the Liberals don’t have any fiscal room to manoeuvre. Last year’s
fall economic statement projected a $31-billion deficit in the 2026-27 fiscal year, and if past experience is any indication, it will be much higher than that.
During the last election, the
Liberals promised nearly $33 billion in new spending in the coming year. And since that time, they’ve announced a slew of new expenditures, including a
$9.3-billion increase in defence spending. To pay for all the new goodies, Champagne asked federal departments to find ways to
cut spending by 7.5 per cent in the upcoming fiscal year.
as already said that major transfers to individuals and other levels of government — which collectively represent nearly half of program expenses — will not be touched. Military and law enforcement will also be spared from the chopping block.
Meanwhile, the fiscal outlook has significantly worsened since the government’s last economic statement. The
unemployment rate hit a nine-year high of 7.1 per cent, after the economy shed 66,000 jobs in August. Many businesses throughout the country are hanging by a thread, unable to withstand the punishment of U.S. tariffs for much longer.
This will further strain the public treasury through increased employment insurance and other benefits, at the same time as Ottawa dropped many of its counter-tariffs, which means less money in government coffers. And, of course, public debt charges will only increase.