Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt
Mark Carney and his finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, have been dialling up expectations for the budget coming in less than two weeks.
Federal Politics Carney government ‘worried’ its budget won’t pass, triggering a federal election
The minority Liberal government must find another party to support their budget, or Canadians will be going back to the polls.
Federal Politics Carney government ‘worried’ its budget won’t pass, triggering a federal election
The minority Liberal government must find another party to support their budget, or Canadians will be going back to the polls.
So it was a surprise on Tuesday to hear another cabinet member dialling things way down — even raising the prospect that the budget might fail.
“What I’m seeing in Parliament worries me,” said Steven MacKinnon, the Government House Leader. He was talking about the growing sense he’s getting that the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois might be willing to trigger an election to vote down the budget.
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If you ask Carney or Champagne, that would be a monumental loss — not just for the Liberals, but for the budget they keep describing in incredibly lofty terms.
Champagne may hold the riding that Jean Chrétien once held, but when it comes to talking about the forthcoming budget, he does not seem to subscribe to the former prime minister’s rule of underpromising and overdelivering.
The finance minister keeps using the word “generational” when he talks about the budget and last Friday, during an interview Carney did in Brampton, Ont., the prime minister was using that same word too.
“We need to pass the budget that we are going to propose in two week’s time, because this budget is generational. This will help define this country,” Carney told RED FM host Shameel Jasvir.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that both things could be true — that the Liberals are preparing a budget they see as a big deal, but one that could also bring down a government that has been in office for just seven months.
In that case, what they’re drawing up right now may have to double as an election platform, which raises the question of how many tough measures are going to be in it, as they say, or whether it would even qualify as an austerity budget.
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Carney also did an interview in the past week with Bloomberg, in which the subject of his prime ministerial lifespan came up.
“How long do you plan to serve?” Mishal Husain asked Carney.
“That’s a great question. My party is in a minority position in Parliament. We ran on a very strong mandate — in other words, to do big things. And the only answer I can give you is that while I serve, we will do those big things. We will do the things that are necessary. We will be straight with Canadians about the scale, the challenges that exist, and do everything we can. And then the political process takes its course.”
I include the whole answer in here because there’s a lot in it. On the one hand, Carney is saying he has big ambitions for the government, which presumably will be unveiled in large part in the November budget. On the other hand, the prime minister seems to be floating the idea — less directly than MacKinnon did — that the “political process” around the budget could be a check on those ambitions.
Elsewhere in the Bloomberg interview, Carney tips his hat to Donald Trump’s ability to do many things at once. “I don’t fully subscribe to this, but I see the effectiveness, the value of ‘flooding the zone,’ of doing multiple things at the same time,” he said.
So is the coming budget a flood-the-zone exercise? Will it be a budget and a campaign manifesto for a winter election?
Making a stop in Brampton last week was a canny exercise in flooding the zone. First, it came days after the stunning announcement from Stellantis that it was moving the Brampton assembly plant’s operations to the U.S — a move that mayor Patrick Brown said made his city “ground zero” in the tariff war with Trump.
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But also, Peel region is one of the most culturally diverse in the country and those voters matter to Liberals. A full 69 per cent of the population is racialized, according to the region’s website, and that figure climbs to 81 per cent in Brampton alone. It also holds many seats that the Liberals failed to win in the last election, which may have cost them their majority. One recent post-election analysis showed that the Conservatives upped their support in Peel by 13 percentage points between the 2021 and 2025 elections.
Something tells me Carney may find himself in Brampton again in the coming months, if not for an election, for just keeping the zone flooded with Liberals.
In the meantime, it’s worth keeping an eye on the how the Carney government is juggling two different timelines as they master the art of expectations management around the budget. They’re telling us it’s a budget for the generations, from a government whose lifespan could be measured in weeks.
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