Andrew MacDougall: Carney and the elites offer the working folk some left-wing trickle down

Budget 2025 reads like a better once again telling their fearful charges not to worry, that this time everything will work out just fine, if they trust the smart man.

By: Andrew MacDougall

It’s a good thing ordinary people don’t read budget documents, because Budget 2025 is not written for ordinary people. The twee condescension of the Trudeau era might be abating, but what replaces it is just as infuriating for anyone who takes the time to read.

Take the budget foreword, allegedly written by François-Philippe Champagne, the minister of finance. A good budget needs to set a tone and the foreword text is typically all tone and key message, all the time. It is, after all, the one bit of the budget text most likely to be read by John or Jane Q. Citizen. The blurb needs to give them the Coles’ Notes on the following (checks notes) 406 pages.

And what do we find in this year’s effort? Sentence after sentence of the kind of talk I heard around various G7 or G20 tables across the dozen or so I managed to attend or staff. The kind of chat that will get you polite nods across the table from your banking and/or management consulting chums. It is not the kind of chat being had around Canadians’ kitchen tables.

“The nexus between energy security, economic security, and national security is clearer than ever before”? Not reading that sentence, mate. Walk into a Tim Hortons anywhere across this land and find me anyone who uses the word “nexus.” And then find me someone who looks at their stretched paycheque and light grocery cart who expresses their anxiety using the term “economic insecurity.” It won’t happen.

Anyway, we read on.

“The systems that long underpinned our prosperity and enabled decades of economic growth — stable global trade alliances, predictable supply chains, a cooperative international order, and reliable partnerships — are being redrawn and constantly challenged.” Yes, Donald J. Trump has gone psycho and is pissing away the United States’ moral and economic leadership. But again, find me someone at Timmies wanging on about “predictable supply chains” and the sour cream glazes are on me. Are the store shelves bare, or are they not?

And on and on it goes. “We are powered by a skilled and diverse workforce, home to leading researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovators.” Tell me you’ve never operated or worked in a small business or care that much about the concerns of those who do.

It’s not that Mark Carney’s words are incorrect — and they are Carney’s words, as evidenced by the British use of the letter S in both “mobilised” and “recognised.” It’s that they have blinders on. They miss entire segments of society, most notably the ones that voted for Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives in the last election. The ones who are feeling the current crunch more than, say, a career banker. This feels like a political error; the budget reads like trickle down economics for the centre-left. Bankers might purr at the prospect of a “generational investment strategy” that “supercharges growth” with its “catalysing” (not catalyzing) spending on airports and ports, but it leaves the average voter none the wiser as to how their life is about to get better.

This is a budget of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite. For Christ’s sake, the foreword includes a paragraph-length quote from Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the IMF. As if that is supposed to reassure someone tapped out after rent and paying through the nose for their milk and sub-standard butter.

If people like Carney and Georgieva had perfect records over the past 30 years they could be forgiven for their happy talk of separating operational spending from investment spending and the productivity-enhancing boost it might give to the Canadian economy. But the point of our current political moment is very much about elite failure and how that elite failure has set the average citizen back. Letting China into the global trading system without forcing them to accept Western standards in return didn’t gut Carney or Georgieva’s line of work. But it did for millions of their fellow citizens. Allowing banks and bankers to leverage the living shit out of every corner of the market in the oughts didn’t really work out all that great, either. Well, unless you were a bank or a banker, or someone who already had the assets in hand that benefitted from over a decade of free money.

And that’s the problem: Budget 2025 reads like a better once again telling their fearful charges not to worry, that this time everything will work out just fine, if only they trust the Big People in government. More specifically, the Big Man Who Understands This Stuff. The budget does not try to assuage any of the average person’s more pressing concerns. Carney is writing for his buddies on Bay Street, not the family who can’t afford to invest in the market.

Nowhere is this failing more evident than on housebuilding. If you had to pick one thing to “catalyse” for the average Canadian, it is housebuilding. At present, the lack of available homes is a block on aspiration and mobility, with rents a drain on the monthly finances for those hoping for better. And yet, here the budget comes up short, despite the foreword promising to “accelerate housing construction.” The Build Canada Homes program, a central feature of the Liberal platform this past spring, receives barely half of the funding promised on the stump. In the words of housing expert Dr. Mike Moffatt: “I went into the budget lockup expecting to be disappointed, but I had inadequately prepared myself for how disappointed I would be.” Sorry, Timmies crowd.

To govern is to choose. The problem with governments everywhere in the advanced Western economies is that those choices are currently being made by a cohort of people who are far removed from the pressures facing the average citizen. Most MPs don’t struggle to get by, what with their bumper six-figure paycheques. Since the global financial crisis, politics has also moved off class and onto identity, a topic that rewards algorithmic viewership more than it solves the real-world problems of ordinary people.

And this dynamic isn’t improved by newsrooms (partially) choosing topics based on what people will click to read. I’ll wager the stories about MP defections and premature retirements got more clicks than anything written about why the housing policy was such a dud. A lot more.

Thank fuck, I suppose, that “Canada is being recognised (sic) as one of the few advanced economies with the fiscal space and discipline to invest in its future.” And if that doesn’t work, a 406-page budget should keep the fire going for a while after the lights go out.

Andrew MacDougall is a director at Trafalgar Strategy and former head of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

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