By John Delacourt

November 5, 2025

A friend and fellow lobbyist recently wrote, in an eloquent defence of our line of work, that “Ottawa is a foreign country” to most Canadians — and certainly most people trying to make a go of it, building a business or running a canola farm.

That sense of how foreign this town can seem rarely hits as hard as it does on Budget Day.

How to explain the ritual of lockup? You arrive in the centre of this universe around noonish on the day of the budget, ingest as much caffeine as possible, line up around the block like you’re going to a movie matinee or an Air Jordans sneaker release and then, as you approach the entrance to the Sir John A MacDonald building, the vibe immediately shifts to exam day, as you get past security and find a seat at one of the tables in a room the size of a school gymnasium. There you wait, adrenaline pumping, for the arrival of officials armed with tiny flash drives bearing the uploaded budget, which are then disbursed like a fiscal eucharist.

As the hush descends, you are bent over your laptop doing two things at once: hitting CRTL-F for every search term of interest to everyone paying you to be in the room, while at the same time, like a monk casting a hermeneutical lens on a sacred text, you’re trying to interpret two or three levels of meaning and significance to the narrative that unfolds, line item by line item, table by table. To either confirm for you that you have cause to celebrate what you’ve read or to console you in your despair, there is a squad of “briefers” circulating in the room.

Sometimes, prior to the distribution of the flash drives, you might also see a minister or parliamentary secretary making the rounds, providing background spin, congratulations or condolences. At around 4 pm, you’re released: both virtually – with a wifi password displayed on giant screens above you – and physically, if you’re one of those rare acolytes who doesn’t have a long list of emails drafted to fire off, one after the other, with bespoke, bulleted summaries of what can break hearts or literally transform the lives, for the better or worse, of those anxiously awaiting your messages.

It’s an exhausting process, requiring preternatural focus and a gift for speed-reading and -writing that can fray your nerves and sap your energy. This year, perhaps to underscore that message of austerity the Prime Minister trial ballooned a few weeks ago and in defiance of eons of public relations orthodoxy, there were no cookies available (even the Harper government during recession was good for a few platters).

At one point, the announcement of briefers circulating sounded like “reefers” to those at my table, which led us to fleetingly hope not so much for free Budget-Day drugs as for the possibility of big bowls of munchies Doritos. Not to be, however; no sustenance to get us through the tome of hard numbers and hard truths on offer.

What was actually in the budget, you’ve no doubt read about from multiple sources by now, but in the takes so far, it’s been interesting to see that a kind of Rorschach test in responses has emerged.

The pronounced focus on themes of capital investment and tech transformation in the budget — from ‘building big’ to laying the track for digital sovereignty — can be interpreted as lines in the sand as indelible as the 49th parallel Trump maintains is a figment of the collective Canadian imagination.

If you would interpret the Carney government’s brief time in office as being defined by Donald Trump — shaping every facet of government from defence procurement to agricultural policy — you see the president’s big beautiful bill, with its raft of tax incentives to bring factory work back to the US, as the implicit target of the new “productivity super-deduction” that will lower the marginal corporate tax rate by two points.

Indeed, the pronounced focus on themes of capital investment and tech transformation in the budget — from “building big” to laying the track for digital sovereignty — can be interpreted as lines in the sand as indelible as the 49th parallel Trump  maintains is a figment of the collective Canadian imagination.

However, if you see the ongoing affordability crisis as the true bête noire Carney’s facing, you were unlikely to see the cuts to government operational spending as adequate or the infrastructure commitments, including the vaunted “Build Communities Strong Fund” as up to the billing as truly transformative for our economy.

More to the point, you were unlikely to see the $78.3 billion-dollar deficit as anything but a sobering reminder that we’ve spent big for years, throughout COVID, a housing crisis, and stuttering productivity. And it’s very much in question as to whether Carney’s measures to radically transform our trade strategy, securing deals with partners in the Asia Pacific and Europe as expeditiously as possible, coupled with an expressed intention to unlock trade barriers interprovincially, will net out and start to register as welcome signs of sustainable growth to a beleaguered electorate. As always in matters of policy fiscal and otherwise, implementation is everything.

As the Globe’s Shannon Proudfoot astutely noted in a pre-budget piece: “Structural weaknesses and bad habits that took decades to set in are not going to be undone quickly. Since Mr. Carney won the leadership, there has always been this tension between the time frame in which Canadians want and need things fixed – that is, the usual life expectancy of political patience – and the schedule on which his proffered solutions will likely land.”

This is the tension that will be determinative for Carney’s government – and this budget – in the months ahead.

However, in Carney’s defence, should he have waited any longer in the rollout of these cuts? In an effort to move forward on projects that both enshrine and empower our economic sovereignty? And in turn, should he have rolled over on the industrial carbon tax, beggared his own commitment to his Liberal platform in order to address debt servicing costs? What Carney has learned about bold but balanced approaches, about incenting and instilling financial resilience in uncertain times, he learned over decades as both public servant — and banker.

Mark Carney didn’t build these skills in the House of Commons. It would be a cruel irony if his fate was determined by vagaries political rather than economic — or by a lawless autocrat contemptuous of serving the public and oafishly incapable of understanding, never mind managing, a nation’s economy. This might be a budget from our own foreign country, but we can only hope its fate won’t be determined by a hostile one.

Policy Contributing Writer John Delacourt is Senior Vice President of Counsel Public Affairs in Ottawa and a successful novelist.