The theme seems to be “reduce operating spending, increase capital spending”. We’ll see how that will blow over with the opposition.
Cut the 30B that subsidizes oil and gas.
That $2B USD from the digital service taxes would not be so bad now.
Also, guess who will pay less taxes, and who will foot the bill?
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2025/11/government-of-canada-releases-budget-2025-canada-strong.html
A bit better diluted: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/budget-highlights-9.6966595(detailed): https://budget.canada.ca/2025/report-rapport/pdf/budget-2025.pdf
Also, guess who will pay less taxes, and who will foot the bill?
Less taxes for the richies and the corpos. Service cuts for everyday Canadians.
Awesome!
I don’t love everything in there but overall, seems a pretty fair mix of “dealing with the American shitstorm”, helping the economy and hopefully getting us on a greener path. Yes, there are parts I’d like more of and otherd of which I’d like less but in terms of a broad compromise that I think is reasonable to a large swathe of Canadians, I’m a pretty big fan.
dealing with the American shitstorm
getting us on a greener pathCan you clarify your position or share the article you read? I might have missed those points when I read the https://www.budget.canada.ca/ report
there are parts I’d like more of and otherd of which I’d like less
broad compromise that I think is reasonable to a large swathe of Canadians,A bit vague no? What do you mean?
Thanks.
Those are two very different parts. Dealing with the American shitstorm is approached with enhanced trade routes etc. You might look at the broad overview here: https://budget.canada.ca/2025/report-rapport/chap1-en.html
On the greener path, sure, there’s a new nuclear plant, carbon capture (not my ideal but probably a reasonable compromise with our oil dependent provinces) Wind West Atlantic and of course, holding onto the industrial carbon price. (The only realistic non Liberal government would be the Conservatives who have been opposed to that since inception.)
there are parts I’d like more of
If I had my magic wand, I’d probably like more green projects, probably some higher wealth taxes though disentangling those from capital investment is tricky etc. I’d also like to keep expanding the national daycare program.
other[s] of which I’d like less
Personally, I’m not entirely sold on a massive military budget buuuuuuuuut, I’m not wildly opposed. There are a few tax cuts that I think are a little silly (luxury jets seems fucking dumb. I hope they catch that somewhere else) and frankly, I didn’t love the gigantic tax cut at the beginning, though I’m in a pretty privileged position etc.
I understand better your points now, thanks for sharing your thoughts and optimism, I needed some optimism.
When I first read the report on budge.canada the “greener path” shows that pretty much everything ended in 2024. Moving forward they mention carbon capture without details what kind of investment they are putting money in (best I could find is funding this https://www.alberta.ca/carbon-capture-and-storage that is also a bit vague), investing in mining (justifying that mining specific minerals helps the environment, but no mention on how to make mining less damaging to the environment and hold companies accountable) and removing the carbon cap saying that investments in several sectors would reduce the emissions anyway. A lot of wishful thinking on the budget text, or on the worst case mental gymnastics malice.
Like, there is this promising
To finance government spending that helps industrial and agricultural sectors get cleaner and more competitive, …
I would love to see the government working with farmers to keep production high and with low footprint. Despite the text being vague on how/who will get the money, farmers are already very thin on their footprint, usually limited to the access of resources to maintain their farms (heat, fertilizers, etc…). A farmer that only has access to gas for heat would not be able to reduce their footprint unless other options are made available.
I also felt like there is no handling “american shitstorm” either, there are plenty of brags on how they capitulate and are one of the least impacted by tariffs because of that.
Also, good thing you bought up the taxes. One thing I found interesting while reading the PDF version earlier, they pretty much teach us on many ways to avoid paying them, I wish that was easily available at the CRA website. =P
removing the carbon cap saying that investments in several sectors would reduce the emissions anyway. A lot of wishful thinking on the budget text, or on the worst case mental gymnastics malice.
A lot of this is through keeping and raising a carbon tax. That makes companies find the most efficient ways to reduce their footprints, rather than the government mandating it for each group. This is the approach favoured by most serious economists and think groups about reducing emissions quickly.
without details what kind of investment they are putting money in
You can look at the “nation building” projects, which include a massive wind farm (green as hell) and a nuclear plant (fairly clean, significantly better than say, oil or gas.)
That makes companies find the most efficient ways to reduce their footprints, rather than the government mandating it for each group. This is the approach favoured by most serious economists
And it is the approach Carney favored in his book (which was written several years before he decided to run for office)
Not at all surprised to hear that! (The book is sitting on my shelf, unread and judging me.)
Wow…that is roughly $2000 per Canadian.
No more private planes tax, no more capital gains tax… middle and lower class Canadians to foot the bill for this “investment”
This is trickle down economics with a tik tok song in the background
The budget was designed to pass.
That means that it was pathetically compromising towards environmental protections, worker protections, a strong stance against the US, etc., etc.
In other words, it’s pretty much a fucking milquetoast mess with nothing good.
Yay! Lower quality services is some that benefits everyone! Thanks bank daddy!
Which services are you thinking of?
The major thing I’ve seen is reducing the number of public sector employees back to 2020 levels, which doesn’t seem wild. (I haven’t seen a good explanation of why we needed to increase the public sector by 20% since then, nor of what we got out of that. If you have anything, I’d love to read it!) Throw in some reductions of outside consultants etc…
There are undoubtedly some programs getting cut. But given we’re teetering on the edge of an adversary induced recession, that doesn’t seem unsreasonable.
Generally speaking, reducing public servants increases consultancy requirements, not reduces.
If you don’t have someone with the capabilites/skills/corporate knowledge/experince/capacity to do X thing on the payroll, then you need to hire a consultant to do it.
Now obviously I couldn’t tell you what ministry/department/etc needs, but let’s take the Alto contract as an isolated example.
We don’t have any rail expertise in government at all, so we need to consult it in, and we pay a premium for that. In the lens of a single rail project, that makes a a lot of sense, we aren’t paying payroll and maintaining expertise for a once in a generation project.
The alternative is having something like a national rail crown corp or department, like SNCF in France. Now all the experience is at the national level whenever you need it. SNCF has a lot more staff, planning, and engineering capacity than it requires; so that gets farmed out to regions and municipalities to help them with their rail/metro/tram projects. This is instead of each of them needing consultants, driving up the costs for municipal governments/capital projects.
In this manner increased federal spending becomes an accelerant for other levels of government and reduces regional and municipal spending, and thus the overall tax burden for everyone.
So if we had something like SNCF then the Alto project might cost a little more, but the Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto, and Montréal recent/ongoing lines would be cheaper; plus medium cities like Victoria, Winnipeg, Québec City, and Halifax would have rail projects in their reach; and smaller cities like Red Deer, Regina, Thunder Bay, Kingston, Trois Rivières, and Fredericton would have tram projects in their reach.
It’s not like we’d have rail experts on the public payroll just sitting around.
And one of the mandates is to reduce consultancies (in large part because there’s been a lucrative pipeline of folks going through the public service, retiring, and then acting as consultants at a much inflated wage.)
Are all consultancies unnecessary? Absolutely not! But have all of them been necessary? Again, ask anyone who has worked in any sort of governmental agency and they’ll laugh as they regale you. (I still don’t know wether to laugh or cry at the guy who earned hundreds of thousands with the recommendation of “you should use this basic microsoft product.”)
(I haven’t seen a good explanation of why we needed to increase the public sector by 20% since then, nor of what we got out of that. If you have anything, I’d love to read it!)
Here’s an easy explanation: we didn’t have enough.
Wait times are no fun, right? Need more people to process the things, or you need to remove some of the regulatory steps involved. Both those, the doing of the work and the fruitless “just make it faster” boondoggles, need meatbags to do the doing.
You now how we can tell we didn’t have enough? WAIT TIMES. When it’s zero, you may have too many staff. When it’s a day, you’re probably just right. Show me a wait time report and I’ll show you 12 months in processing delays that we should have avoided by grabbing an intelligent peon and making them do some things of the things that need doing – because processing delays and wait times are absolutely the shits right now.
QED
To each their own.
Edit: removed personal details.
If you know anyone who works in government or a quasi governmental agency, they will tell you horror stories of colleagues who couldn’t be removed but couldn’t be arsed to do anything over the bare minimum (like being sober, showing up and handling at least one file a day.)
There has to be something in between the nihilistic conservative “burn it all down, no more bureaucracy!” and the opposite “every government employee is sacred!” I think a slow reduction through attrition and buyouts seems pretty reasonable and gives enough time to actually find efficiencies and innovations.
The fundamental flaw is equating corporate efficiency with public effectiveness. A company’s goal is shareholder returns, so it serves profitable customers and abandons the rest. We see this taken to its extreme with certain venture capital and private equity firms: they can buy a company, burden it with the debt used for its own acquisition, extract massive fees and dividends, and leave it a hollowed out shell. When it collapses, the architects of that failure are shielded from the consequences.
A government’s mission is the opposite: to serve everyone, especially the vulnerable. Applying this profit extraction model to public service doesn’t eliminate costs it just shifts them, following the destructive maxim of ‘privatize the profits, socialize the costs.’ For a corporation, this might be a successful short-term play. But for a government it’s long-term ruin
Applying this profit extraction model to public service
Getting back to 2019 spending levels over a few years is hardly hollowing out the government.
And what that freed up money is doing is investing in stuff that makes those services work better.
For example in healthcare, which is hanging on by a thread, I think a few billion are going to building and renovating hospitals and investing in a new medical school. Those all make the services more efficient and sustainable in the long run.
Edit: My goodness, the cuts are something like 13 billion out of a 500 billion budget.
Most of the money got reallocated to the military though.
They’re cutting 13 billion. 51 billion (over 10 years) is going to local infrastucture; housing, roads, health and sanitation facilities.
Yes, military got more (~82 billion) and I don’t love that. Though, one part I do love is that a chunk of that military is also dual use, so climate emergencies like wildfires, floods etc.
I don’t have anything in particular, as I haven’t seen details, but the public service exists to serve the public, cutting the workforce ends up reducing services. Since we’re on the edge of a recession I’d say tax the billionaires, go back and charge Google for the billions that we were supposed to get before Carney bowed down to trump. We will now also have many unemployed more unemployed people which causes strains in other areas. I remain unconvinced that cuts for austerity purposes are ultimately beneficial, raise taxes on the ultra wealthy instead
the public service exists to serve the public, cutting the workforce ends up reducing services.
But what services did we get with our ridiculous expansion of the public service over the last four years?
charge Google for the billions that we were supposed to get before Carney bowed down to trump.
If memory serves, the tax in total, wad supposed to bring in 2 billion. We are paying an order of magnitude more than that to deal with tarrifs affected industries. It seems pretty reasonable to assume something that hits trump’s donors so precisely would elicit a reaction that would cost us much more than we brought in.
I’d say tax the billionaires
Sure, I’d like to as well. But there are I think less than 100 billionaires in Canada. Say we could soak them for even another 100 million a year each (which would be extraordinary and almost require some wild changes to the tax code because of the nature of their wealth, but let’s put those complications to the side.) Groovy. Until what, 1 in 10 decide it’s worth that 100 million plus the existing difference to move to the States or elsewhere. It’s a tricky balance and I’ve yet to see any of our populist “just tax the rich!” really show their math.
Edit: finished my thought after clicking accidentally.
OMG, let them move! We don’t need these social parasites.
Okay, but the person to whom I’m responding wanted to save money by taxing them. So, what services would you cut to be rid of the people who are paying for those services?
The problem with the existence of billionaires is really the wealth inequality itself, not the number of dollars in their bank accounts.
Inequality is what gives the ultra-wealthy their outsized influence in the political economy.
Dollars are not scarce items; the government can issue currency essentially at will. Taxes aren’t there to fund services. They exist to reduce inequality.
So yes, tax the billionaires. And if they leave: we’re better off that way too!
Sorry, I seriously disagree with about all of this.
Inequality is what gives the ultra-wealthy their outsized influence in the political economy.
This is about Canadian politics. We have strict rules and limits on donations, advertising and support. Like anything, could probably be better but it’s a pretty fair balance.
the government can issue currency essentially at will.
Apologies but this is childishly ignorant. Look to most countries in South America about the consequences of doing so. Inflation is very real and reducing the value of the Canadian dollar hurts those who can afford it least.
Taxes aren’t there to fund services. They exist to reduce inequality.
Absolutely not. Being equally poor without teachers, doctors, roads, defence, I mean my God.
tax the billionaires
We do. You let me know how much you think we do currently, how much more you would like.
And if they leave: we’re better off that way too!
Who needs hospitals, schools, emergency responders etc anyway? At least we won’t have dumb ol’ rich people anymore!
This budget is ass.
