William Watson: What would I like to see in the budget? Doing less with less

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during a press conference after the 2025 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders' Meeting in Gyeongju on Nov. 1, 2025. Photo by JUNG YEON-JE/AFP via Getty Images

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The two things Mark Carney has said since being elected that I’ve liked most: On election night he talked about the need to govern with humility, which he claimed is a key Canadian value. And then there was that line about how you campaign in poetry but govern in prose, which he jokingly changed to “govern in econometrics,” to reflect his professional training. Lord help us if he really does use econometrics: the budget will be written in alphas, betas, sigmas and thetas and only 1,000 people in the country will be able to read it — though, question: would that make it more or less transparent than usual?

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If Carney governed in economics, however, that would be good. Not the economics that says we now understand where economic growth comes from and will adjust the “policy levers” so as to make it happen. But the economics that says to every benefit there is a cost, incentives matter, and almost anything you do will have consequences you didn’t anticipate or intend.

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If every policy change came with even a guesstimate of costs, benefits, incentive effects and possible screw-ups, that would be a big improvement. The modern custom is instead to state that a problem exists, introduce an agency or program with the problem in its name, and then allocate a budget of X tens of millions of dollars to it, with the amount proportioned, not to the likely effect on the problem, but to the impression the budget line will create among the constituencies most worried about it.

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I also hope the budget is economical — with both the government’s time and our attention. These days, budget plans run to several hundred pages. The past one, April 2024’s, was 430 pdf pages. More information isn’t always better, especially if it’s self-praise and backside-covering: lists of just how much the government has already done to solve problem Y. Let’s have a “Just the facts, ma’am” budget. And speaking of ma’am: let’s ditch the legal obligation to analyze budget impacts on the gender majority and various woke minorities.

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Most budgets are hortatory, talking about challenges to be faced, opportunities to be seized, transformations to be catalyzed — transformation and catalysis are likely to be big in this one — and so on and so on. There are also elaborate attempts to squeeze dozens of policy changes into a handful of budget themes. April 2024 — anyone remember? — had; Lifting Up Every Generation; Economic Growth for Every Generation; Safer, Healthier Communities; Protecting Canadians and Defending Democracy, with the overall theme of Fairness for Every Generation. All very forgettable and very quickly forgotten. (I had to look it up.)

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My advice: dismiss all the thematic editors and do it the way a family would. What’s our income? What can we afford? How much can we safely borrow, if we feel we really must borrow? And then, usually in a list of declining dollar value, what items are we going to spend on? In fact, everyone I know who goes into the budget lock-up goes to the summary tables, finds the big-ticket changes and reads about those first.

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For those who still believe a budget’s style and theme are important, well, leaner, economical, un-fluffy and uncluttered are actually the best themes for these times. U.S. tariffs are making us poorer. Our real incomes — and therefore our potential tax revenues — will be lower than they were. The usual spend-a-palooza just isn’t on. Nor is the speechwriter’s reflex about how we’ll all have to do “more with less.” No, our challenge in 2025 is to do less with less. The prime minister has been talking about hard choices for a year now. A stuffed budget in the Trudeau mould would send exactly the wrong message, thematically.