By John Delacourt

November 8, 2026

The Carney government has been in place for more than 600 days now, and with its second budget — a brick of a document weighing in at over 500 pages, portentously titled Masters of our Destiny/Maitres Chez Nous —  there was no shortage of content to go through in the feverish hours of lockup before it was tabled in the House.

Yet, if the first budget of any government tells you what a prime minister hopes to accomplish with his mandate, the second budget is always instructive because it gives you a better sense of how the prime minister plans to get things done.

The foundations have now been established; this is, despite the familiarity of names in caucus and Cabinet, effectively and fully a transformed Liberal government.

The org charts in each Minister’s office have been filled from the admin assistants to the chiefs of staff. Those staffers who survived from the Trudeau era are gamely battling exhaustion, and the new ones coming in seem both overwhelmed and cautiously exhilarated, such is the pace of change and the focus on deliverables.

Crucial conversations on the art of the possible are approached with a new realism – and pragmatism regarding the timelines for project approval — and a stronger, clearer style of governing has emerged.

Just how different is the Carney government with its sophomore budget? It is instructive to look at Trudeau’s second for contrast.

That sophomore effort was notable for its projected $28.5 billion deficit, which implicitly confirmed the Liberals had reneged on their 2015 campaign promise to return to a balanced budget within four years. Trudeau’s team was betting big on the launch of the $950 million supercluster initiative, working with key sectors to jump start economic growth and innovation across the country.

A lot of grant farming ensued, along with an oversubscribed strategic innovation fund that would put some applicants in protracted processes with multiple committee reviews, all managed by harried and under-resourced department officials.

By 2019, adjusted for per-capita GDP, Canada ranked 19th out of 31 OECD countries for economic growth, behind such powerhouses as Ireland, Slovenia, and Hungary.

To be fair, all governments here in Canada have struggled to boost economic growth and productivity since the 90s (at least). The Superclusters represented a bold vision; however, the threading together of strong value chains, from proteins to scale AI, faced headwinds macroenomically — not least with the arrival of the COVID years, combined with the new protectionist trade policies from the US.

The impact of lockdown on our supply chains and the new, coarsened dialogue with Washington have made Carney’s case for long-term economic resilience and middle-power coalition building more convincing than any failure to launch of the Superclusters initiative.

Crucial conversations on the art of the possible are approached with a new realism – and pragmatism regarding the timelines for project approval — and a stronger, clearer style of governing has emerged.

By focusing on how Carney’s governing, this budget is, I’d argue, a second chapter that began less with his first budget than with the Investment Summit in September.

Carney’s approach to mastering Canada’s destiny is all about attracting investment for transformative infrastructure and energy development projects. It represents industrial policy that is more dirigiste than Canadians have seen since the days of C.D. Howe, that postwar “Minister of Everything” who, through the lean years of the Depression all the way into the late 50s, led the scaling up of everything from crucial munitions supply to shipbuilding, turning Canada into a major postwar industrial power.

Like Howe, Carney’s eager to bring in his own “dollar-a-year” people through the creation of new Crown corporations, from Build Canada Homes to the Defence Investment Agency, and this budget announced that the Canada Strong Fund will now have crown-corp status and an expanded mandate as well.

One of the key characteristics that distinguish crowns from agencies is board governance; there will be more guidance and counsel from the major players in these sectors. Also, look to the language around the re-booted Invest in Canada, with its expanded mandate to convene future investment summits, to read how fundamental this investment strategy is to the Carney mandate.

By way of numbers, the budget as sequel to the summit is there in the investment incentives. If the summit unveiled the Productivity Mega Deduction (lowering the marginal effective tax rate, or METR, on new business investment from 13% to 6.4%), the budget’s new Canada Growth Incentive — something the tech sector has lobbied for — affirms that tech bros are builders, too.

The incentive provides an exemption on up to $15 million in qualifying capital gains for “high-potential” businesses while delivering a small-business incentive for those firms that reinvest these proceeds into Canadian companies ($715 million of tax breaks over four years, beginning in 2027–28).

The budget also marks a return to first principles with key financing agencies. The government has heard from SMEs about how conservative and siloed these entities have been for low-cost and/or debt financing.

The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and Export Development Canada (EDC) will merge, bringing more than 5,000 employees and $128 billion of assets together to power a stand-alone development bank backing small and medium-sized businesses at home and abroad.

The Canada Infrastructure Bank – another initiative from the Trudeau years that has struggled to get on its feet – will now be administered by the Minister of Finance rather than the Housing and Infrastructure Minister, and it will take on responsibility for the Canada Indigenous Loan Guarantee Corporation.

When these changes are viewed with how empowered the Canada Growth Fund will be now, as a $15-billion subsidiary of the PSP Investments pension fund, getting projects and businesses off the ground and into new markets should be a very different proposition.

The grind of governing always transforms leadership in interesting ways. When Carney first came to power, much was made of him being a kind of Cincinnatus figure from high finance, who, instead of leaving his plow in the field, left his colleagues at Brookfield to come in and restore stable and effective leadership to the country – with the implication, pace Cincinnatus, that he wasn’t really in it for the long haul.

But these structural fixes to how government works with investors and builders are for the longer term, as is, of course, the dramatic reorientation of our trade and defence policies with our partners around the world.

A focus on long-term resilience is now really a fundamental reimagining of Canada’s place in a global economy – and how it can best be positioned for more than simply success, but leadership.

That’s a mastery of our destiny C.D. Howe would have understood.

Policy Contributing Writer John Delacourt is Senior Vice President of Counsel Public Affairs in Ottawa and a veteran Liberal strategist. He is the author of several novels, including The Innocent Canadian.