Prime Minister Mark Carney’s pre-budget positioning speech on Octoer 22 in Ottawa/CBC

By Lisa Van Dusen

October 22, 2025

Sometimes, a budget is more than just a budget. In the case of the Carney government’s first federal budget being tabled on November 4th, the latest clue to its oversized, melodramatic quality was the speech that Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered as a prime-time address to the nation Wednesday night from the University of Ottawa (above).

Not the substance of the speech; the fact of it.

Most federal budgets do not gather collateral complications on the road to Parliament the way this one has, like a giant horseshoe magnet festooned with geopolitical subplots, existential political risk, fiscal jump scares and reputational stakes so stratospheric for the former serial central banker for whom it will serve as a proven or disproven pudding that they require the grounding reset of a direct-to-camera exposition interlude two weeks from B-Day.

We haven’t even seen it yet, and already we know this budget is a hostage to history — or at least to the reality-show history of tactical tariff wars, selective sectoral purging and epic defence spending that have redefined our economic relationship with the United States.

“I will always be straight about the challenges that we have to face and the choices we must make,” Carney said Wednesday night. “And to be clear, we won’t transform our economy easily or in a few months — it will take some sacrifices, and it will take some time.”

There are two major forces acting upon this budget that make it more than just a budget.

The first is the external factor of Donald Trump. More precisely, the both exceptional and asymmetrical influence on this budget of American trade and foreign policy whose deviations from convention, norms and expectations are being justified by Trump’s personal volatility.

The second force acting upon this budget to make it more than just a budget is the domestic factor of political precariousness, with the potential for a second federal election in seven months catalyzed by a vote of non-confidence on the budget in a minority government context. Nobody wants this. Unless, of course, they do.

This factor has emerged in a not-entirely unpredictable way in the past week after months of having been inhibited by the external economic threat of Trump’s tariff war.

As budget day has loomed larger, Ottawa’s opposition parties have reverted to a more traditional, leverage-based approach to fiscal politicization. Which is why Carney spent time ahead of his ad hoc pre-budget speech on Wednesday meeting with opposition leaders amid fears of a threatened if not-yet likely collapse in confidence.

“What we’re seeing is our opposition parties, the Bloc Québécois who, without having even read the budget, eliminate the possibility that they will support it, and the Conservatives making just ludicrous demands with respect to the budget,” Government House Leader Steve MacKinnon told reporters on Parliament Hill on Tuesday.

This duelling pre-calibration of public and political expectations would seem to leave Carney in the position of fiscal Goldilocks, with most expert observers erring on the side of a go-big deficit.

“When I see opposition parties ruling out the possibility of voting for the budget, that’s starting to worry me,” MacKinnon said.

On Monday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre released a pre-budget letter to Carney calling for an “affordable budget” that includes broad tax cuts and keeps the deficit under $42 billion.

Whether Poilievre was — with what is widely seen as an eccentric deficit number — seeking a diversion from the current controversy surrounding his assertion that the RCMP should have jailed former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau depends on the degree to which, in our exotic political ecosystem, Trumpian bellicosity has become a confirmation of un-electability or a signifier of its opposite.

Meanwhile, the fiscal considerations defining the space where rubber and road meet on this budget have been framed by competing theories of the prognostic case.

On the one hand, the current Interim Parliamentary Budget Officer, Jason Jacques, warned last month with a level of alarum normally reserved for burning buildings and falling pianos that Canada’s pre-budget fiscal status quo was “stupefying,” “shocking” and “unsustainable”.

On the other hand, Jacques’ predecessor as PBO, Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy President Kevin Page, writing for Policy‘s Budget 2025 Series in his reliably temperate manner, has countered that, not is so many words, the sky is not falling. “The reality is that there is no fiscal crisis,” writes Page in Budget 2025: Financing Canada’s Hinge Moment, “No precipice.”

This duelling pre-calibration of public and political expectations would seem to leave Carney in the position of fiscal Goldilocks, with most expert observers erring on the side of a go-big deficit reflecting Carney’s argument since the election campaign that size doesn’t matter, or that it’s the quality of the spending and the efficiency of its harnessing as a driver of economic growth that matters in the medium- to long-term — an approach echoed in the IMF’s latest Fiscal Monitor guidance.

Indeed, hours before Carney’s speech on Wednesday, Desjardins Deputy Chief Economist Randall Bartlett forecast in a pre-budget report that the federal deficit will hit $74.5 billion — a surge in government spending he characterized as a “gamble” that will produce either unsustainable levels of public debt or — per Carney’s calculation — a new era of economic growth.

“What sets this budget apart from previous budgets is the size of the deficit outside of a recession or pandemic,” Bartlett told Canadian Press.

Alas, that’s not the only thing that sets this budget apart from previous budgets.

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.