Carney's "And a Diet Coke" Budget
If he says austerity and investment, it makes it okay. Math be damned. We are that dumb.
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Saul of Tarsus had his road to Damascus, knocked from his horse, blinded by a great light, reborn in a flash. Mark Carney has not had such a moment. No light, no horse, no confession. He has not, as Paul did, declared that everything he once preached was wrong. He has not admitted that his earlier sermons on climate change, carbon taxes, and banking orthodoxy were absurd.
The Austarity Budget 2025
Instead, he has taken the Canadian road: long, slow, evasive, littered with half-repudiations and rhetorical fog. The road to Damascus at least has an ending. Carney’s road leads nowhere, and he drags us along it.
Carney was once the high priest of sustainable finance, his Bible a thick tome called Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Its central commandment was simple: every financial decision must bow before the altar of climate change. He wanted the banks held captive to disclosure bureaucrats, small businesses forced to file climate transition plans just to get a line of credit, the bloodstream of capitalism redirected through Ottawa’s climate commissars. This was not free banking but financial conscription. That was the road he demanded we walk. And in his own words, the vision was stark:
“Western society is morally rotten, and it has been corrupted by capitalism. This requires rigid controls of personal freedoms, industry and corporate funding. This is not a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better, but to temporarily make them worse. This will be a world of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience and temporarily more poverty.”
Then came the campaign. Out went the banker’s cassock, in came the tough guy’s jersey. “Elbows up,” he declared, a promise to stand firm against Donald Trump and defend Canada’s sovereignty with swagger. Boomer women lifted their elbows in solidarity, marching to the polls like it was an aerobics class. They elected him because he appeared strong and sounded defiant. But the road curved quickly. Once elected, Carney confessed the obvious: Canada cannot bully a superpower ten times its size. The “elbows up” was lunacy. The road he sold was theatre; the road he took was retreat.
The Austarity Budget 2025
And his very first instinct in office? Not to bring down a budget. To dodge it. To delay. A budget is the one act of honesty in our parliamentary system — the balance sheet, the arithmetic, the ledger of truth. Refusing a budget is equivalent to refusing accountability. His road was not fiscal discipline but fiscal fog.
Meanwhile, the economic reality is ugly. Canada has the fastest population growth in the G7 — over 13% in the last decade. Naturally, total GDP rises: more people, more output. And so Carney and the Liberals boast: “GDP is up, the economy is growing.”
But what matters is real GDP per capita — output per person, adjusted for inflation. And that has flatlined. In fact, it has declined in five of the past six quarters. The average Canadian today is no richer than they were in 2017, and many are poorer once inflation is factored in.
Consider the arithmetic: real GDP grew by about 1.1% in 2023, while population grew by 3.2%. That means each individual’s slice shrank. From 2000 to 2023, Canada’s average annual real per capita GDP growth was about 0.7%, the second-worst among the G7. From 2014 to 2024, the cumulative growth was barely above 1%. A decade of running just to stand still. And all the while inflation ate away at wages, savings, and purchasing power. If you feel poorer, it is because you are.
Yet Carney and his friends in government keep repeating the half-truth: “GDP is up.” It is economic ventriloquism — the numerator swells, the denominator is ignored, and the voters applaud. This is not prosperity; it is statistical fraud.
The tragedy is not merely that the government lies, but that voters believe it. Vibes, feelings, and slogans lull Canadians. The Liberals’ secret weapon is not clever policy, but the uninformed voter —the citizen who hears “growth” and thinks “better off.” And the most culpable are not Gen Z TikTok voters but selfish boomers who wanted a leader to look strong, not be strong, to look green, not deliver growth. They bought the elbows-up pantomime, and the country pays the bill.
And Carney? He pirouettes. He scrapped the consumer carbon tax — but kept industry levies and the bureaucratic machinery. He paused the EV mandate — but did not kill it. He reviewed the oil and gas emissions cap — but did not repeal it. He floated LNG projects and mining schemes he once damned. He panders to every audience, telling Muslim groups that “Muslim values are Canadian values,” as though values were costumes to be changed per crowd. He dissembles about his own investments, claiming little beyond property while his interests run through Brookfield. His road is paved with reversals, but he never admits a turn.
And what of his record? His fingerprints are all over Trudeau’s disasters. He advised on the carbon tax, the EV fantasy, the disclosure craze, and the binge spending. He chaired Trudeau’s task force on growth that delivered stagnation. The results are plain: per-capita GDP decline, productivity collapse, housing fiasco, carbon tax revolt, EV mandates suspended. The Carney-Trudeau experiment failed, and Carney cannot pretend he was a bystander. He was the architect.
The most damning thing is not that he was wrong, but that he is dishonest. The budget dodge, the GDP spin, the identity pandering, the investment evasions. A man who lectures others on values while treating truth as optional is not a moral leader but a moral opportunist.
And the media? They grease the road for him. The Globe and Mail, CBC, CTV, and the Toronto Star — all indulgent, labelling his reversals as “pragmatism,” reporting GDP growth without noting per-capita decline, and covering pauses as though they were repeals. Only the National Post occasionally raises an eyebrow, and even then, it is a lone trumpet drowned out by an orchestra of deference. The road is smoothed, the bumps flattened, the contradictions covered.
So who is Mark Carney?
Is he the prophet of Value(s) who wanted banks turned into climate police? Or the Prime Minister who now shelves carbon taxes and whispers fiscal discipline? Is he the campaigner who preached “elbows up” bravado, or the leader who confessed it was lunacy?
Is he the adviser who helped Trudeau wreck productivity and housing, or the pragmatist now pretending to steer away?
He is all of these, and therefore none. A man of values with no value. A man who sells virtue in hardback and expediency in office. A man whose road is not to Damascus but to nowhere — paved with evasions, lined with illusions, and patrolled by a media too timid to call his bluff.
And now we have the budget he fought like a cornered animal to delay — the second largest deficit in Canadian history. The sleight of hand is linguistic: he calls it “investment.” Investment, apparently, is the new euphemism for debt. The trick is to imply that borrowed billions are magically productive, that somehow future taxpayers paying principal plus interest are not paying at all. This is the oldest racket in politics: rename the bill, and hope the electorate is too dim to notice the waiter is still bringing the cheque.
Look at where the money actually goes. The table of major federal spending tells its own story — interest on the debt now rivals the health transfer, outstripping defence and nearly equalling infrastructure. Yet the word “investment” is waved like incense, a holy term to sanctify insolvency. Austerity is invoked in the same breath as the largest deficit ever recorded. Are Canadians really this credulous? Perhaps. Call it a national talent: to be soothed by vocabulary while our wallets are emptied.
Federal Spending Breakdown (2025 Budget, approximate)
Public debt charges alone outstrip defence and rival health transfers. This is not “investment”; this is mortgaging the present to service the past.
But Carney, like all conjurers, insists the trick is real. Investment! he says, as though the word itself banishes the arithmetic. He is asking Canadians to believe that the government —a machine that cannot fill a pothole without a feasibility study —is the most efficient allocator of capital. Investment in what?
How much of this deficit is going to military readiness or infrastructure repair—traditional public goods—and how much to climate boondoggles, consultant fees, and DEI bureaucracies? Carney never says. The word “investment” is meant to pre-empt the question.
So the road continues, the road to nowhere. A road paved not with repentance or reckoning but with euphemism. Canadians are told the biggest deficit in history is an “investment,” just as they were told elbows-up bravado was a strategy, just as they were told per-capita stagnation was growth. The question is no longer whether Carney is lying, but whether Canadians are stupid enough to fall for it. Given the record, the answer is: probably.
The road, the road, the road: not to revelation, not to repentance, but to the cul-de-sac of Canadian decline.