By Lisa Van Dusen

September 29, 2025

There are two reasons why Mark Carney’s first federal budget in the role of prime minister is already burdened with the weight of unprecedented if not unreasonable expectations.

The first is that this budget, to be tabled November 4th, is indeed Mark Carney’s and the second is that this budget is also Donald Trump’s.

The reason this is Mark Carney’s budget as opposed to “the Carney government’s budget” or “the Liberal government’s budget” or even “Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s budget” is that Carney owes his April election victory in large part to the disproportionate, circumstantial value assigned by voters to his highly specialized expertise.

As a Harvard- and Oxford-trained economist, a veteran of the global Goldman Sachs financial empire, a former senior official in Canada’s Department of Finance, a former governor of the Bank of Canada and the only human being on the planet who has, for an encore to that last role in any country, assumed the same title in a foreign capital, Mark Carney knows money.

In 2025, knowing money doesn’t mean what it meant in 1980 or even 2000. Knowing money now means knowing: how it behaves in the borderless, wireless wilds of 21st-century capitalism; how it can be conjured from nothing and wrapped in a camouflage of complexity to baffle Alan Greenspan and wipe out tens of trillions of dollars; how technology has both tamed and hacked the market; how crypto and CBDCs aren’t the same thing.

Carney has seen the havoc mismanaged money can wreak in debris field after debris field from the 1998 Russian financial crisis to the 2008 global financial cataclysm. Carney is fluent in the language of Wall Street, Bay Street, Threadneedle Street, Davos and Jackson Hole.

In more practical terms, he knows all the steps in the delicate dance between monetary and fiscal policy, he understands the accountability of government to Parliament in the Westminster system and how governments transform revenue into policy and political priorities. Carney knows money at a level of facility with 21st-century global financial anthropology that other heads of government seek out when making their budgets.

Which means that, just as some prime ministers and presidents are their own minister of foreign affairs or secretary of state, Mark Carney is his own minister of finance, whether he likes it or not.

For that reason alone, this would be no ordinary federal budget. As it happens, this is also an extraordinary budget because Trump looms over it as no previous foreign leader has over any Canadian federal budget, except perhaps in wartime, notably the last time a tyrant delegated and dictated the actions of governments across much of the world.

Just as some prime ministers and presidents are their own minister of foreign affairs or secretary of state, Mark Carney is his own minister of finance, whether he likes it or not.

As a G7 democracy — indeed, as the G7 democracy next door to a besieged democratic superpower so hacked by strategic corruption and tactical deception that: a reality-show star is fronting its systemic alienation and systematic disrepute; troops are being deployed to the woke redoubt of Portland; late-night comedians are being purged like balky Trostkyites; and there is, in perhaps the most predictable plot twist yet, another apparent Clinton comeback in the works — Canada finds itself in a unique position.

In that sense, this is a wartime budget, with the 21st-century refresh that the war is an avoidable, orchestrated economic one bearing what has become the new-world-order operational calling card of several utterly fraudulent casus belli.

And, per the budget as blueprint for Canada’s fiscal priorities amid an economic war, the stakes for this normally routine government accounting exercise are unprecedented.

In terms of public support, the usual considerations of fiscal competence (avoid deficit sticker shock), fairness (avoid smacking of trickle-down), political perspicacity (avoid defunding the RCMP Musical Ride) and economic knock-ons (avoid any recession that can be blamed on you instead of on Donald Trump) are now spiked with the emotional additives of fear and anger over the role Trump has played in altering the conditions in which this budget is being delivered.

It may not be an invasion, but in a context of economic belligerence, the impact on Canada’s fiscal margin of manoeuvre of speciously rationalized, random and arbitrary, treaty-breaching tariffs and drastically increased military spending that will generate jobs, innovation and industrial benefits but that was nonetheless coerced by a president who, in ominous autocratic fashion, deploys his own military against his own people, is not insignificant.

In a recent Policy piece, The Scowcroft Group’s Fritz Lodge wrote that Vladimir Putin “may hope to achieve via disinformation and negotiations what he cannot achieve on the battlefield”. If Canadians were not concerned that Trump may hope to achieve via economic warfare what he cannot achieve on the battlefield, they might not have elected a former central banker as their economic Eisenhower.

Fairly or not, they will be counting on Carney to prove them right about that on November 4th.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, senior writer for Maclean’s and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.