Gabriel Giguère is a Senior Policy Analyst at the MEI. An independent think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary.The federal government is tabling a tenth consecutive budget deficit, this one hitting $78 billion.The ship of state is adrift.Neither is the federal government proposing any route to bring the country back to the port of budgetary balance. The message to the Canadian population is clear: fiscal rigour forms no part of the government’s vision. Rating agencies will take note.Worse still, the government is trying to muddy the waters by resorting to an accounting sleight of hand to obscure the true size of the deficit.This trick consists of categorizing corporate subsidies and other kinds of expenditures as capital spending, thereby sidestepping the need to account for them in the operating budget.In this sense, the budget proposal amounts to taking money from the paycheques of Canadian taxpayers — through their income taxes — to subsidize corporations and fund government-built homes. This approach more often than not ends up hurting the economy, as ably demonstrated by the current finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, during his previous mandate meddling in the battery sector..Despite the budgetary contortion that lets the government present a portion of the deficit as “investments” (read: expenditures), everyone will understand that the final result remains the same: a burden of debt for future generations.And it is a burden that will weigh heavily on the youths of today and tomorrow.The debt piled up over the past decade, under the Trudeau government, will entail paying additional taxes of a little under $30,000 over the course of the lifetime of a 16-year-old today.The 2025 budget adds another layer.Yet, Minister Champagne says that this is good news for Canadians.It’s hard to share his point of view when a child born today in Canada inherits $33,000 of public federal debt. At the very least, this is a poisoned gift.An alarming situation merits a serious approach, but the government prefers to stick its head in the sand.Faced with a debt that just keeps on growing, it is young people who, sooner or later, will pay the price. Interest alone on the debt is set to hit $76 billion in 2029-2030, which is $10 billion more than what the Quebec government spent on healthcare in 2025..Despite some marginal cuts, the budget presented is not a serious attempt to deal with the situation we find ourselves in. It should propose a much more ambitious plan in terms of reducing the size of the civil service and eliminating costly programs.A fiscal anchor is required to steer Canada back on course.The federal government must quickly make budgetary balance its North Star again; otherwise, this growing debt will only exacerbate intergenerational inequity.The budgetary drift of the past ten years was a political choice.It’s time to take the helm once again and return to the rigorous management of public finances.If nothing else, we owe it to future generations.Gabriel Giguère is a Senior Policy Analyst at the MEI. An independent think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary.
