A new government without a new budget

Open this photo in gallery:

The economically minded government of Prime Minister Mark Carney, the administration promising to tighten the reins of government spending and already being hailed for bringing back blue business Liberals, is going to skip the 2025 budget.

Why bother? There’s so much to do, so little time. So Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne told reporters Wednesday that Mr. Carney’s government is going to put off delivering its first framework for the public finances till the Fall Economic Update.

So October? December?

“Fall is fall,” Mr. Champagne replied.

There’s no arguing with that, or indeed with any of the justification for omitting the 2025 budget that Mr. Champagne presented to reporters in three steps - precisely because it contained no real justification at all.

Step one, Mr. Champagne said, is the middle-class tax cut that Mr. Carney supposedly authorized Wednesday when he signed a piece of paper. That’s not really step one, because the tax cut has to be brought forward in a ways and means motion in Parliament. But whatever.

Step two, he went on, will be the Speech from the Throne opening Parliament on May 27, which will outline the government’s priorities. Step three will be a Fall Economic Update.

This was the way that Canada’s Finance Minister skipped over the announcement that he was skipping the annual spring budget.

At one point, as Mr. Champagne repeated the steps, he noted the government would need to introduce a ways and means motion to implement the tax cut, which made it seem like step one had become step two. But then he repeated the original order: Step one is the tax cut,

Mr. Champagne assured assembled journalists that the government was following the logical sequence.

Still, Canadians might like to see some official numbers to illustrate how it might add up, you know, since there’s a new government and all, with new promises and different plans.

It’s been 393 days since the last federal budget. The last Fall Economic Update was a schemozzle tabled after then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland suddenly resigned, complaining about then-prime minister Justin Trudeau’s wrong turn on fiscal policy.

Now there’s a new prime minister who has promised an economic focus and a return to fiscal discipline, but his government won’t have a fiscal framework of its own for at least another 130 days, because fall is fall.

Certainly, the government of Canada will not fall apart because there is no budget. The federal government is funded through supply votes in Parliament, and the budget is really a framework for how it all fits together. The federal government has skipped annual budgets before, though not often, and the last time was because of a global pandemic in 2020.

And to be fair, Mr. Carney’ Liberals are just back in power after a rapid leadership change and an election campaign, so a spring budget would probably have been a relatively skinny document that didn’t include all the new plans.

But you’d think this former central banker’s government would feel it necessary to present the public with a state-of-the-finances document, updated with measures like the tax cut that Mr. Carney pretended to authorize on Wednesday, as well as the parts of the Liberal election platform that are ready to be translated into official policy.

That platform assigned a cost to all Mr. Carney’s promises for each of four fiscal years and projected $20-billion in revenues in the current fiscal year from tariffs on U.S. goods. It’s appropriate for the mandarins of Finance Canada to check that math and incorprate it into the official blueprint.

Is this year’s deficit still expected to be the $62.3-billion projected in the Liberal platform? Or more?

Leaving such questions hanging for the next five or six months seems like a touch of self-vandalism after Mr. Carney won an election with a brand as a sharp economic and financial manager. He is supposed to be heading a government in a hurry to implement a strategic plan.

Instead, Mr. Carney’s government wants a little leeway, time to adjust before Mr. Champagne shows us the numbers. A breather. Perhaps in five or six months there will be a recession. Or some new trade arrangement with the U.S.

But let’s go back to Mr. Champagne’s three steps. First the specific: a tax cut. Second, a statement of over-arching priorities. Third, a framework for paying for them. That’s not anyone’s logical sequence for strategic planning.

It’s only in politics where the first step is the public-pleasing stroke of a pen in front of the cameras. Even in Hollywood, you need a budget for the theatrics. In government, it’s key to showing the public you really have a plan.