Enjoy Canada Day, because our country is about to get worse.
Our nation is trapped in the spiral of decline.
It’s Canada Day 2025, and the weather is good! It’s bright and sunny, everyone’s outside having a good time, the vibes are truly immaculate.
So I recommend to all my readers that if you haven’t already today, you should go to one of the many festivals across our country and get some food, listen to some live music, and watch the fireworks shoot up in the sky!
I really do recommend you enjoy Canada Day this year. Because to be quite frank, I’m not sure how much of a celebratory mood we’ll be in for next year’s Canada Day.
We need to talk about the elephant in the room; the quality of life in our country is in decline, and it’s about to get even worse. We have elected a new government that, behind the shadow of Canada Day celebrations, is undertaking an effort to unravel the basic fabric of civil society.
Sounds fun, right? Very exciting.
The constant talk of “efficiencies” and “spend less, invest more” from Prime Minister Carney has caused real anxiety about what he will do to the government programs Canadians rely upon. These vague kinds of phrasing are typically used by centrists who seek to impose deeply unpopular cuts, cuts which they know the public would not accept if put into plain terms.
And with the release of Carney’s sole Mandate “Letter” to his cabinet in late May, the clarity added to that last phrase triggered alarm bells and confirmed fears. Of his seven priorities, Carney’s final is “spending less on government operations so that Canadians can invest more in the people and businesses that will build the strongest economy in the G7.”
We have seen this before. We have seen the rhetoric that the public service must be defunded so we can hand those tax dollars over to unelected billionaire oligarchs, who we can surely trust more than an elected government!
It is the same neoliberal trickle-down bullshit that destroyed the middle class in the 1990s and 2000s. The only thing that “trickles down” in this kind of situation is the rich trickling piss down onto our faces. And the shape of things has become increasingly clear in the week leading up to this Canada Day.
When Mark Carney went to The Hague, the capital of international law, to plot with other NATO members how to violate it, he delivered some bad news to Canadians.
You see, just as Canada is finally hitting the 2% of GDP spending requirement that NATO asks of members, Donald Trump is changing the rules, and bumping it up to 5%. Canada will be meeting this as 1.5% spending on basic infrastructure like roads and rails, which is good, and 3.5% spending directly on military personnel and equipment, which I also think is good.
You see, I do think that Canada needs to spend a lot more money on our military, considering the Yankee Entity is a fascist regime with revanchist and irredentist obsessions around annexing Canada into the “51st State”.
But I want that spending to go to weapons manufacturers in Europe and Asia. If we need to defend against the Yankee hordes, then we cannot purchase advanced military equipment that relies upon American assistance to maintain. The F-35 may be the most advanced fighter jet in the world, but Canadians cannot trust an American computer that relies on regular software updates in order for the jet to fly.
Both myself and nearly two-thirds of Canadians certainly don’t want to spend tens of billions of dollars tying ourselves closer to Trump with absurd boondoggles like the Golden Dome, when we actually voted as a nation to assert sovereignty, and pull away from the Yankee Entity.
But there’s a different problem. Mark Carney is allergic to taxes, and he wants his former colleagues in the financial sector, from Bay Street and Wall Street and Canary Wharf, to succeed in capitalist exploitation even more than they already have.
So he’s told Canadians that the increase in defence spending will mean cuts to other areas of our lives. To pay for increased defence spending, much of which will appease the Yankee Entity rather than shore up defence against it, the quality of your daily life is about to become worse.
In what ways? Well, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has a pretty grim forecast for you. Estimates say that Mark Carney’s promised cuts for the fall budget could amount to a twenty-four percent slash to the federal government’s public service.
Think about that. His arbitrary demands to slash billions of dollars from the budget will result in one in four federal public servants losing their job. And that will be much worse for the vast majority of normal people in the public service, when you consider that the military, which already makes up 28% of spending, is the thing that Carney promises to boost.
When Trudeau’s so-called “increases” to the public service were merely a reversal of decades of intentional decline, this holds as a bad portent for the future, especially when the CCPA claims these cuts would be worse than those of the Harper era.
There are valid criticisms to be made about the most efficient use of the public service, but it’s obvious to anyone that if you want the government to be capable of doing more, they will need more people or more resources.
What will this mean to you in practical terms? The CCPA’s Senior Economist David Macdonald claims “this is you calling CRA and nobody picks up the phone, you’re trying to get a passport and there’s no one there to renew it.” Considering the furor in the COVID era over temporary delays, I can’t imagine the public will be happy with permanent cuts.
Former journalist and “art dealer” Evan Solomon has been selected by Carney as Canada’s first-ever “Minister of Artificial Intelligence”, and the implication is clear that reductions in the public service will somehow be justified with “AI”, a deep overestimation of just how shitty Large-Language Models can be.
I have never, since the dawn of these so-called “AI chatbots”, had successful customer service that I did not need fixed by an actual human. God help us if every time we need to file your taxes, we’re being audited by ShitGPT.
This isn’t the version of Canada I want to live in! I don’t want to be in a country where we take from the poor to give to the rich. I’m pretty sure that’s not how the legend of Robin Hood is supposed to go!
The federal government is slashing at the very basics of our lives, and the “Elbow’s Up” platform that Carney ran for votes on is now firmly replaced by surrender to Trump, allowing Canadian tax policy to be dictated by Mar-a-Lago.
So enjoy Canada Day while you can, folks. Because I’m not sure how proud we’ll be of this country in 2026. I know I’m already skeptical.