Canada is Barreling Toward a Fiscal Abyss

The latest federal budget from Mark Carney’s government bares a simple truth: Canada is barreling toward a fiscal abyss, and the mainstream media is cheering it on. A deficit of $78.3 billion is being celebrated as big-government boldness to counter the perceived threat of Trumpian economic policies. Interest payments alone this year ring in at $55.6 billion and climb to an estimated $76.1 billion by 2029-30. Why is hardly anyone calling this what it is: a reckless surrender of future generations’ prosperity?

The mainstream narratives insist Canadians should “embrace” government spending as an investment, as though it were a form of national virtue rather than a liability. We are told that swelling program after program is simply the cost of being a modern society and will help preserve democracy and fight the horrific threat of climate change, whatever that means at the moment. The harsh truth is this: we’re mortgaging our children’s lives so we can spend recklessly today. If households behaved this way, adding tens of thousands in new debt per year and paying thousands in interest per year just to manage that debt, it would not be called boldness, it would be called financial ruin. Maybe it is time for a Dave Ramsey for Canadian Finance Minister campaign?

“We’re mortgaging our children’s lives so we can spend recklessly today.”

The true elephant in the room remains unaddressed: overspending on bloated bureaucratic social programs. The government’s own financial tables show public-debt charges climbing not because of some external shock, but because the debt stock keeps growing. Gross borrowings this year are $614 billion, 75% of it just refinancing what we already owe. The apparatus of government is expanding, the liabilities are expanding, but the scrutiny is shrinking as the media continue to frame every new entitlement as “progress,” every lavish program as “investment.”

Unsurprisingly, this spiralling spending creates dependency. The rhetoric around universal basic income is moving from fringe to framework. Legislators in Ottawa and the Senate are actively exploring it, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has run the numbers, and bureaucratic appetite is being whetted. What happens when trillions more are committed to entitlements that must now be serviced with deferred tax burdens? The answer: a generation enslaved by a government-administered life of hand-out stability with no escape hatch.

In just one generation we are witnessing the destruction of affordability for future Canadians. As interest costs climb from $55.6 billion today to $82 billion-plus by the early 2030s under plausible scenarios, every new dollar spent on programs means one less dollar for tax cuts, infrastructure, or paying down the debt. Households mean business when it comes to budgets, they don’t tolerate open-ended borrowing without discipline. Why should Ottawa be any different?

Here’s a difficult truth: no major political party is willing to confront the roots of the crisis. They will argue over levels of spending, but not whether the spending is sustainable. Largely, the political class is avoiding the key question: when the liabilities exceed the ability to pay systemically, what gives? We need more than tweaks. We need a populist, peaceful revolution of financial realism.

“Here’s a difficult truth: no major political party is willing to confront the roots of the crisis.”

We should demand from our leaders a hard fiscal rule: program spending must grow no faster than population plus inflation. We must insist on an interest-cap clause with a hard freeze on deficit spending for the next decade. We must call for real audit-and-sunset provisions for the largest social programmes. These are measurable, enforceable and non-ideological. They anchor responsibility and signal a shift from dependency to autonomy.

Further, the media must stop normalizing grotesque fiscal expansion as patriotic sacrifice. They must frame budget deficits as moral failures, not heroic investments. Canadians deserve to know that when government borrowing becomes a way of life, the bills get passed to generations who didn’t vote for them and will still pay decades later.

The future of Canadian freedom is not in more dependency, more programs, more borrowing. It’s in disciplined budgets, empowered individuals, and the restoration of affordability. If we don’t redefine our national narrative soon, we will soon have a legacy of bondage marketed as universal basic income, enslaving the next generation into perpetual poverty with no prospect of success beyond survival.