Canada’s Corrupt Liberal Government

“Patience is a virtue.” In today’s world, however, particularly in politics, this adage is being put to the test. With the many challenges society currently faces, populations can quickly turn on those they elect if they don’t see things changing rapidly enough.

It’s been over six months since Mark Carney was elected prime minister with hopes soaring sky high that someone of his economic experience and heft would get Canada back on track.

One thing the Carney Liberals are masters of is spin. They have been proclaiming the wonders of their very late budget for weeks and have managed to turn water into wine for many Canadians — not the least of which was a Tory backbencher who defected to the other side on budget day.

Apparently, they had been working on this fellow for years, trying to convince him to become a Liberal, and it finally took when he became disgruntled over not being made a deputy speaker — or something like that. They also brought in the heavy artillery, and Carney himself persuaded him. Whatever the details, he walked.

On November 4, François-Philippe Champagne described the 2025 federal budget as “generational.” In doing so, the finance minister offered a rare example of plausible political hype, without the usual hyperbole.

The challenges facing Canada are profound, and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has responded with a massive surge in military spending and a suite of significant investments in housing, infrastructure and AI — investments only partially offset by widespread cuts to other areas.

Mark Carney’s first budget has landed in a House of Commons deeply divided. Now, one of the first wave of post-budget polls shows that Canadians are similarly torn about the fiscal blueprint put before the country this week.

Abacus Data went out in the field the day after the budget was unveiled and came back with what it is calling “a muddled first impression.”

While awareness of the budget is reasonably high, it is eliciting two starkly different political reactions. Just over half of those aware of the budget, 52 per cent, said it was a step in the right direction, but 48 per cent said it set Canada in the wrong direction.

Just no pleasing the Star.

No Canadian federal budget in my conscient lifetime, going back to finance minister Walter Harris in the St. Laurent government, has been as noisily hyped or widely anticipated as the Carney-Champagne budget of this past Tuesday, and none has been such a stultifying anti-climax. What was promised was a cornucopia of “generational investments” that would ”define our next century” by making a series of “difficult choices (and) sacrifices.” The same prime minister who is in a photo finish with his British analogue Keir Starmer for who can be more obsequious to President Donald Trump, but who promised to keep his ”elbows up,” promised also to “swing for the fences” in the budget with intermittent hints of ”austerity.”

When Parliament’s finance committee slipped Recommendation #430 into its 2025 pre-budget report, few noticed. Yet the clause proposing to delete “advancement of religion” from Canada’s definition of charity could transform the country’s social landscape. If adopted, every church, synagogue, mosque, and temple would be taxed like a business and lose its authority to issue receipts to donors.