It’s an interesting budget for sure. I have been reading about it via RBC’s summary along with (rather annoyingly) the Fraiser institute which though conservative biased was very thorough. Read sections of it myself and also ran it through an AI tool with prompts looking for gotchas or anything that doesn’t check out/ is false. the general Gist I got is that most of the budget rumors were true other than the rumors that many equality childcare and dental/pharmacare were on the chopping block. The AI wasn’t super helpful other than it pointed out that the budget being split into a capex opex model is inline for your average economist, that it was somewhat generous in ascribing some costs as capex not opex specifically siting the UK and Singapore and that a huge section of the budget assumes there will be 500 Billion in private institutional investments but that there is no way to measure that and it’s more of a hopeful semi educated guess than a guarantee or strategy as there is no way to even measure what private institutional spending was caused by this or how it would be measured(Fraiser institute droned about this a lot). The downside is it does theoretically weaken environmental legislation and insinuates it’s funding for LNG power plants is somehow “green” (before someone jumps on me to fight for or against this I’m not saying we need to leave all the oil in the ground like some but lets not pretend taking it out of the ground to burn it doesn’t cause climate change whether it’s “green” or not).
Long story Short Big money on military spending, middle income tax break, large infrastructure projects, Housing, and local AI projects. all things must be sourced from Canada first. cuts to public sector in management positions the rest through attrition. reorganize and hire Government workers and contractors to move all these projects as fast as possible. a lot of reorganizing of how we classify spending to make it easier for your average business owner or corporate finance guy could understand but that seems designed to hide the fact that we are spending an eye watering amount of money.
Good summary.
I was happy to see that several departments said they were going to spend less on outside consultants although I didnt see any hard numbers on how MUCH less. Its been disturbing to see the number of public servants skyrocket over the last few years and then ALSO see the budget for ‘consulting’ balloon to inordinately high costs - 21 BILLION last year?! In perspective, thats over 100,000 people being paid 200,000 for their reports or opinions and one would guess that they dont JUST work for the government.
Like, if you’re hiring a lot of new employees, why are you not hiring people who can do that work in house? Or is ‘consulting’ the way that political friends can grift the gov by charging ten times the cost of an in house employee?
All I know is I am glad about the removal of luxury tax on Yachts and Jets that is really going to help me and my family get ahead. We will be able to get out this cardboard box and into a Lear Jet a lot sooner than expected now 🤣
It’s part of his 4D chess housing plan, we can move into yachts.
All I keep hearing is this budget is just another big handout to corporations. Again, the anecdotal image of Canada is truer than ever: Canada is a bunch of corporations in a trench coat.
Everything in this budget signals that Canada is open for business (great!), but at the expense of our futures - financially and environmentally (terrible). The big gamble here is Carney is trying to court private capital to invest at least 500 billion over time. Has this worked out well historically for Canada? Some would say yes, but I’d argue we often get less than if we did it ourselves. I’m sure the vultures are circling already.
Anyone who’s looked into the past of where this has happened will know that this is budget is risky. It leaves a lot of power in the hands of private capital and if they do not come, you can say bye-bye to the dollar even more. By slashing public service employees, the government is effectively removing not only services, but also money that circulates through the economy. This means less money to buy goods and services and less money to be taxed back. (I do not think it costs the government 100k per year to pay for a 100k per year salary ultimately since part of the earnings are taxed back to where it came out from.)
The big gamble here is Carney is trying to court private capital to invest at least 500 billion over time. Has this worked out well historically for Canada?
Canada has never broken economic ties with the US before. The roster of public employees has gotten out of hand,
Guess who does the hiring of public employees? The management. Yet we don’t see management take the brunt of the consequences - instead we see the negative effects downstream to the employees. Is this even fair? Until management level employees have any real skin the in the game, it’s disingenuous to blame the large roster.
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