The Carney government’s first budget is being sold as “generational.” As the economic plan’s central metaphor, it might be spot on. But for young people, the takeaway may not be what the government hopes for.
The budget document and Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s speech make obsessive use of the words generation and generational. It’s a textbook case of branding-by-repetition — a nation-building budget designed as a piece of nation-branding. You can’t go more than a few paragraphs without running into another invocation of generational ambition:
“The level of uncertainty is higher than what we have seen and felt for generations.”
