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Mark Carney’s first federal budget is being sold as a pro-business “investment super cycle,” but its own tables show a $62.3-billion deficit this year and federal debt climbing from $1.3 trillion to $1.6 trillion over five years, with interest costs reaching $85.5 billion a year by 2030.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne tabled the budget Thursday. On budget day, NDP Leader Avi Lewis posted a video from Parliament Hill holding up a chart from the 550-page document, saying two-thirds of the spending goes to tax breaks and credits for investors and big corporations.

“If you are struggling with the cost of groceries, trying to pay your cell phone bill, the rent or the mortgage, this government is not focused on you. It’s focused on them,” Lewis said.

On Friday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra Levant said Lewis is “partly right," in that Canadians should not mistake Carney's businessman-like talk and governance for a commitment to the free market.

“What Carney is doing is not capitalism. It’s not the free market. It’s crony capitalism," he said. "It’s insiderism. That’s a government lavishing money on its friends.”

Ezra offered three examples from the budget. The first is a plan to hand Canada’s four biggest airports to private operators on 40- to 50-year concessions, with the government’s new $25-billion Canada Strong Fund taking an equity stake. He said he supports privatization, but not this version.

“So the former Brookfield chairman announces a 50-year concession on the country's airports with the government's fund as the senior partner and the bidders just happen to be the people he flew in for his summit," said Ezra. "This is not a market deal... This is a deal between friends, with you providing the dough.”

The second is the list of companies receiving direct cash, loans or equity from Ottawa, including up to $1.6 billion for AI firm Cohere and up to $2.5 billion for De Havilland. Ezra pointed to a line in chapter six saying federal financing crown corporations are expected to have a “greater risk tolerance than private sector peers.”

“That is not an investment strategy. That’s literally a definition of a bad investment... That is not even investing. That is gambling," said Ezra. 

The third is pipelines. Ezra noted that private companies lined up to build them with their own money in 2010, only for Ottawa to block them, and that the government now builds them itself.

“That’s not capitalism," repeated Ezra. "That’s a government that broke the market and now sells you the repair.”

He argued the people deciding where the money goes come from finance, not from building businesses, and said they crowd out real entrepreneurs.

“Since when is the free market a room full of former Goldman and Brookfield men deciding which companies get a government check? That is not free enterprise.”

Where Lewis gets it wrong, Ezra said, is in the cure.

“His answer is more government. Take the $36 billion and spend it on cell phone bills instead. Same machine, different friends.”

Ezra closed by saying nobody in Ottawa, not Carney and not Lewis, is offering a return to the free market.

“So the next time you hear this budget being called pro-business, ask the question that matters: whose business?" said Ezra. "Because I’ll tell you, it ain’t your business.”