Canada’s Corrupt Liberal Government

Protectionists, start your engines. On Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled a “Buy Canadian” procurement policy that prioritizes Canadian suppliers for all manner of federal spending, including a second set of national “major projects” he’s announcing on Thursday. “We will build Canadian, by becoming our own best customer,” Carney intoned. Ottawa will allocate nearly $186 million in new funding to the policy, including “streamlined support for Canadian small and medium-sized businesses trying to break into the federal market.”

MAGA strategist Stephen K. Bannon calls it “flooding the zone.” U.S. President Donald Trump demonstrated it in his first weeks back in office, when he introduced over 100 Executive Orders. Regardless of their legal viability, the sheer volume of policy changes is the point. It is a political strategy to overwhelm institutions, courts and social groups, preventing effective opposition.

In Canada, we are witnessing our own version of “flooding the zone” from new Prime Minister Mark Carney, in coordination with provincial and territorial premiers.

The Star is harsh.

Our 2025 federal budget is 493 pages long. The word ‘youth’ appears only eight times. The term ‘child’ appears only six. More than seven million Canadians under the age of 18 who access government services across multiple sectors such as justice, policing, education, national training initiatives, and health care, have somehow been forgotten about in Ottawa.

References to children and youth in this budget are limited to the most extreme efforts of protection or survival. Or, they are mentioned in terms of being the third-party catalyst to dollars that incentivize or assist adults.

Wraychel Gilmore??!!??

The Star is not happy. Carney don’t care about no kids no how anyway.

“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.”