Mark Carney's Liberals present a Conservative budget
Investing in tax breaks, so we can make 40,000 people unemployed
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne presented Budget 2025 to the House of Commons in Ottawa, and to the Canadian public they represent, at 16h00 ET today. He claims the Liberals “chose” Canada, and that he hopes the other parties in the House of Commons “choose Canada as well.”
Certainly not a loaded statement in a minority government where both the Official Opposition and the Crossbench have stated they do not feel the Liberals will be presenting a budget they can support! Yes, Mr. Champagne, please insinuate that everyone outside the Liberal caucus “opposes” Canada if they do not vote for your budget!
Canadians may ask: what kind of budget did Prime Minister Carney’s Liberal government present to them? Very succinctly, he will spend less on working people, so he can invest more in private corporations.
Let’s walk through all the lowlights of Budget 2025, and see everything that will make the working class squirm.
On Page 53, we have a clear contradiction that illustrates a core problem with the underlying theory of Carney’s budget:
“When productivity grows everyone benefits: the wages and incomes of hard-working Canadians rise, businesses have the conditions to grow and to create more jobs, and Canada stays competitive in global markets.”
But productivity as an economic measure is fundamentally defined as the ratio of output compared to input. Hence, the claim that greater productivity means greater wages is blatantly false: productivity means spending less on inputs, which include wages, compared to the output products or services for sale.
To be fair, there are some inputs which do not include wages, such as improving the equipment used. I have no problem with businesses or government enhancing the capacity of their workers! The problem, however, is that Carney’s budget pictures using higher efficiency to reduce the number of workers, not increase their collective productive capacity.
On Page 213, an almost Orwellian paradox is posed to us: “A leaner public service is a more empowered and productive public service.” No, Mr. Carney, it is most certainly not. On Page 206, the Federal government makes clear they will reduce the current public service headcount from 368,000 in 2023-24, down to roughly 330,000 by 2028-29, “a decline of about 40,000 positions or 10 percent.”
Ten percent? They plan to get rid of one in every ten public servants, and expect us to believe that the same productive capacity will remain for the Canadian government? This proposition is absurd. The reality is that tens of thousands of former public servants will become unemployed, unable to feed their families or pay rent, something I would best describe as an act of economic sabotage.
Public infrastructure is a good thing, but reduction in the public service means that fewer people will now need to manage more public projects. The first five projects under the Major Projects Office as listed on Pages 77-78 include an LNG pipeline, nuclear power plants, a shipping port, and two mines, totalling $60 billion CAD.
Further projects being considered without firm commitments or price tags include the boondoggle of carbon capture, but also reasonable plans for wind turbine energy in Atlantic Canada, an all-weather corridor for northern communities and the military, upgrades to the Port of Churchill, critical mineral extraction in various regions, and the Alto high-speed rail network between Toronto and Québec.
My support for many of these depends on whether they primarily consist of subsidies for private corporations, or a genuine investment in public capacity. Unfortunately, much of this infrastructure will not actually be “public” in the sense that is meaningful to the real Canadian public.
Page 85 says that LNG facilities will have accelerated tax deductions if they don’t pollute too much—and yet they all pollute too much—and all manufacturing or processing of buildings will have immediate tax expensing.
The following page boasts that Canada will have the lowest marginal effective tax rate in the G7, “below the OECD average”, meaning we are racing to the bottom against 37 peer countries supposedly committed to a higher standard of living.
That, perhaps, explains how the deficit is growing to $78 billion CAD, while the Canadian government is doing even less with our money than the little it was before.
To the credit of the Carney Liberals, some of the core social democratic programs remain in principle, with new automatic filing to ensure more eligible Canadians receive them, and the National School Food Program is becoming permanent.
But I don’t believe the public service will maintain these programs at their current level of quality if they now have less staff to perform the work. And overall, despite those social programs and some hints of positive infrastructure investment, this budget primarily focuses on tax breaks for the rich and powerful, and sacrifices from the working class.
Will it pass, however? Potentially. There are 343 seats in the House of Commons, and the Liberals only have 169 MPs in their caucus, requiring three MPs outside their caucus to either vote in favour or abstain from the vote in order to pass Budget 2025 and maintain confidence.
The 22 MPs in the Bloc Québécois have indicated through their leader that they are opposed, as has lone Green MP Elizabeth May. The Conservatives are naturally opposed, as they have been to Liberal money bills since Paul Martin’s era, but the Tory caucus has just dropped from 144 MPs down to 143, as Nova Scotia MP Chris d’Entremont has left to sit independently, and is considering voting for the Liberal budget.
That may require just two flipped votes out of the seven NDP MPs, and while they definitely won’t vote for this budget after the pain caused by the confidence-and-supply agreement under Jagmeet Singh, they don’t appear ready for an election. If five of them vote against while two abstain or choose to not be present, they can keep the appearance of voting against, while allowing Budget 2025 to pass.
Ultimately, all of this comes down to the NDP. If they want an election, they will trigger one, and if they don’t want an election, they won’t.