Masters of whose destiny? Carney's budget hands the country to his friends
A $36-billion corporate write-off, long-term airport concessions and a taxpayer-backed investment fund put Ottawa at the centre of deals that reward investors while public debt keeps climbing.
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Article by Rebel News staff.
Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: Prime Minister Mark Carney's budget is being sold as a pro-business investment supercycle, but the tables, the cheque list and the people writing the cheques look less like free-market capitalism than a government dealing with its own friends.
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne tabled the budget on Nov. 5. Carney wrote it. The government's own tables put the deficit at $62.3 billion this year and $62.5 billion next year, never below $52 billion in the forecast. Federal debt climbs from $1.3 trillion to $1.6 trillion. By 2030, interest reaches $85.5 billion a year against a Canada Health Transfer of $67.7 billion. Annex 1, Table A1.8 puts bankers ahead of doctors. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation flags debt-interest costs of about $1 billion a week.
NDP Leader Avi Lewis, grandson of David Lewis, who coined "corporate welfare bums," stood on Parliament Hill with a budget chart and said one-third of the spend is for people and two-thirds is tax breaks and mega deductions for investors and corporations. "Christmas come early if you're a big investor," he said, naming the $36-billion Productivity Mega Deduction and asking who the "masters of our destiny" really are: the wealth funds and private equity moguls at the Prime Minister's Investment Summit in Toronto in September.
Lewis is partly right. Chapter 1 is titled "Canada's Investment Supercycle." The document creates a Major Projects Office and a $25-billion Canada Strong Fund, seeded with tax dollars, that will sell "Canada Strong Notes" next year. Carney says an Investment Summit "unleashed" $500 billion. The vocabulary is mergers, equity stakes, co-investments and concessions, the language of the Goldman Sachs banker he was for thirteen years. Free-market capitalism risks private capital; this budget risks taxpayer capital and directs it to people the government already knows.
Chapter 1 puts Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary airports on 40-to-50-year concessions, with $37.6 million set aside for due diligence and an operator due by early 2029. Equity stakes go to the Canada Strong Fund, so the government's new fund takes a cut of the government's own deal. The natural buyers are infrastructure and private-equity firms such as Brookfield, where Carney was chairman until he ran for Liberal leader. Alberta's liquor-store sale a generation ago put customers first; a former Brookfield chairman announcing concessions with his summit invitees as likely bidders is something else.
The cheque list includes up to $1.6 billion for Cohere, up to $2.5 billion for De Havilland water bombers, $500 million for the Red Chris mine, a $4-billion Forestry Sector Accelerator, up to $3 billion for two CANDU reactors in Romania, and nearly $3 billion from the Canada Growth Fund and Canada Infrastructure Bank for Darlington. Chapter 6 instructs financing Crown corporations "to have a greater risk tolerance than private sector peers," an order to take bets the private market refuses. Ottawa already owns Trans Mountain, bought for $4.5 billion and built for about $34 billion. Alberta is putting $2.5 billion into the next pipeline, labelled national interest by the Major Projects Office. In 2010, private companies lined up to build pipelines with their own capital and Ottawa blocked them. Fifteen years later, Ottawa builds them with taxpayer capital and calls the result an investment supercycle.
Carney spent thirteen years at Goldman Sachs and chaired Brookfield. Energy Minister Tim Hodgson spent twenty years at Goldman. Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Sabia ran the Caisse de dépôt; chief of staff Marc-André Blanchard came from the Caisse as well. Annex 4 calls one new capital-gains break "strongly regressive," with 84 per cent of the benefit going to earners over $200,000.
A 24-year-old watching the same document sees immigration held at 380,000 permanent residents a year plus 370,000 temporary arrivals, with a one-time Chapter 3 path for up to 200,000 temporary residents already here: as much as 622,000 new permanent residents next year on one tally. Media lines add $300 million for the CBC, $134 million for the Local Journalism Initiative and a $501-million journalism tax-credit extension covering private radio and television. In September the government named the Prime Minister's wife Canada's first Ocean Envoy with no competition, and the budget sets aside $12 million to archive Justin Trudeau's papers.
Young voters are being sold that package as capitalism: fifty-year airport deals, hand-picked corporate cheques, a Goldman-alumni fund, media subsidies for newsrooms covering the budget, a title for the Prime Minister's wife, and hundreds of thousands of new competitors for basement apartments. Zohran Mamdani, a self-described socialist, took the New York mayoralty a year ago this week with 68 per cent of voters under 40. Lewis's cure is more government spending, the same machine with different clients. Nobody in Ottawa offers the free market that once meant starting something without a Brookfield man's approval. The only question left when this budget is called pro-business is whose business it serves.
GUEST: Franco Terrazzano, Federal Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, on the budget release.
