The 2025 Budget is My Least Favourite Literature That I've Read in Years

This much hyped budget merits a collective shrug. Let me break down some of the highlights.

Yes, I know the budget isn’t literature.

This budget was supposed to shake a generation. The problem is that they said they were going to write a masterpiece, but when the performers arrived they didn’t know how to play their instruments.

The actors had a lot of passion, but the screenplay is shit.

The trailer was good, but the plot was predictable.

The takeaway is that Carney is another Liberal. ”Generational investment,” “transformational,” “new government.” None of these things are true.

If this is all you read, know this: this budget is neither transformative, nor generational, neither left nor right, neither bad nor good; this budget is, at the best, a fairly average liberal budget with a ‘conservative’ lean. Carney’s Liberals want you to believe they are a new government. They are the same government with an ideological realignment.

Beyond the exact details, of which I have highlighted some, the biggest thing that stood out in this document was the level of insecurity that was found within its pages. When writing a film, the rule is to show, not tell. In the Liberal budget, they desperately tell you, for five hundred pages, that this budget will change the country. Yet for such an ambitious statement, the numbers are few and far between, the specifics are non-existent, and the book is filled with endless filler, never proving what it claims. The numbers and facts don’t support their rhetoric.

Its incredible length could have easily been cut in half. It is a repetitious document that begs to be seen as something it isn’t. The editing is verbose, afraid, and shows the government for exactly what many already knew it would be. It’s a centrist Canadian government, and there is virtually nothing in the budget that surprised me in a positive or negative sense.

Something to note about the budget is that there was not very much “new” spending, with the exception of our defense budget. When reading the document, most of the programs introduced before, but renewed and adjusted. If you squint you’ll see the previous government popping its head through.

It surprised me how few new ideas were in the document. The biggest changes are the cuts to public service, and a much heavier reliance on PPPs, objectively the worst way to run our social programs, but it’s the way that we’ve done it in Canada since the 90s.

There’s still plenty of good to discuss before I rip the document to shreds. The budget has a great start to a new housing program that could lead to big results, but it needs to be better funded. It turns the government into a developer in a significant way. They talk about a “focus on non-market housing,” which is great. We’re seeing a real shift towards properly managing this housing crisis. However, this is with some major caveats.

The first being the reliance on PPP, the second being that they’re not going far enough or fast enough. These innovations won’t be enough to significantly reduce the housing deficit or to quickly bring down rental prices. Long term it will help, but this program should be the center of their platform, and they should dump their investments into defense, and put all of it into housing. Nonetheless, this is a great start, and I am pleased and hopeful.

Making the National School Food Program permanent is huge. They’re expanding the program across the country, and this will actively lift children out of poverty. I mean, this is a real progressive win. It’s great to see. Fantastic. Half a million children will be given free lunches every day. Wonderful. Now tax the rich and pay for it.

The creation of automatic tax filing for those below the poverty line should have been done a hundred years ago. Poverty stricken families often don’t file their taxes because of how little money they make, however many of these people are able to receive significant support from the government, whether tax breaks, or subventions. Hopefully, long term, it will turn into a program that works across the whole country and not just for the poor. For now, this will help out many poor families. They said it will be in place for 2028, which would be great.

They’re introducing laws to clamp down on greenwashing, which is great, and they’re going to build laws that better integrate highly credentialed immigrants such as international health care workers.

Finally, massive investments into wind power and expediting the high speed rail, which will be controlled by the crown, is great. We need that rail as soon as possible. It will change the country, since it will cover almost half of Canada’s population. Sorry westerners, you’re all a bit out of luck.

Despite some excellent investments, there’s still a lot of cuts and a lot of nonsense in the budget. The biggest problem is the tax cut.

A 1 per cent effective tax rate cut for the bottom two tax brackets is leading to a 28 billion wealth redistribution to the richest Canadians. When the government collects less revenue, it has fewer funds for public services like healthcare, education, or housing supports that disproportionately benefit lower- and middle-income groups. Wealthier individuals rely less on those services and thus lose little from the cuts, while still pocketing their share of the tax break. The result is a double upward shift: high earners gain directly from the tax reduction and indirectly from a government less able to fund redistributive programs.

Furthermore, the tax cuts are so insignificant won’t even have the desired effect of making people feel like they have a bit of extra cash in their wallet. The libs claim that it will save the average family of 2 $800 a year, while costing the federal treasury $28 billion a year. It will cost the government as much as they say, but it won’t save Canadians nearly as much as they pretend.

The CCPA did the math during the election. It’ll probably only save $660 a year. Meanwhile groceries are exorbitantly expensive, and that probably wouldn’t even cover one month of most people’s grocery bill. The average per Canadian household per month, including drinks/alcohol, food, etc, is $721 a month.

So while it won’t change anyone’s life, practically speaking, the loss of revenue is instantly apparent in the budget and will affect almost literally everyone’s lives.

Canada’s 2025 budget seeks $60 billion in savings over five years through public-service cuts, program “rightsizing,” and slower spending growth. Up to 40,000 federal jobs may be eliminated, and funding for Indigenous programs, health transfers, and foreign aid will decline. Environmental and housing initiatives face reduced or delayed investment, while child-care expansion stalls. The government frames these moves as efficiency measures, but analysts warn they will weaken core social services—particularly those relied on by lower- and middle-income Canadians—while preserving tax relief and capital projects that tend to favor higher earners. The question is therefore what they will be replacing 40,000 workers with. Right now, if you call the CRA, you aren’t getting an efficient answer. So what will they do?

You already know.

AI. The government will be the first employer in the nation to replace mass amounts of workers with AI. Suddenly Pandora’s box will be open, and every other administrative position is in danger from AI, if it wasn’t already. Not only that, but the government is putting almost $1 billion into AI investment. They’re betting it all, and it will likely work short term. The investments into AI will probably not pan out. A useful tool? Absolutely. A replacement for people’s brains?

Well, maybe some people.

I asked ChatGPT what it thinks about how Carney could have made a much better budget with better taxation. Its proposal was earnestly better than this mediocre document.

Fundamentally rebalanced Budget 2025: keep the government’s capital and social investments (housing, childcare, pharmacare rollout and green infrastructure) but pay for them primarily by (1) instituting a progressive wealth tax (1% >$10M, 2% >$100M), (2) taxing capital gains at ordinary rates for the top 5% of incomes and raising the capital-gains inclusion rate progressively, (3) enacting a permanent excess-profits surtax on corporate profits above a high threshold and rolling back universal immediate-expensing windows that benefit large firms, (4) introducing a small financial transactions tax and a temporary windfall tax on extraordinary fossil-fuel profits, (5) reinstating a high-threshold estate tax, and (6) sharply beefing up CRA enforcement to recover avoidance and close transfer-pricing loopholes — revenues from these measures immediately fund expanded universal childcare, a national pharmacare baseline, accelerated social housing construction and a Just Transition fund for green jobs while freeing up operating savings to cut the structural deficit and put the federal debt-to-GDP ratio on a steady downward path without cutting core social programs; administrative savings and reallocated corporate tax expenditures are reinvested into productivity-enhancing public goods so growth remains strong even as debt falls. (This keeps the investment focus the Budget emphasizes while shifting the financing burden upward and applying targeted anti-avoidance measures to protect revenue integrity.)

Maybe the first person we should replace with AI is our minister of finances, who wrote this budget.

The budget is removing the emissions cap on industrial polluters. This is a bone that the Liberals are throwing to Alberta and it’s fairly plain to see that it’s a way of undercutting much of the Conservative Party’s ammunition. They touted it as a law that prevented them from producing oil, which was a blatant lie. The law said “produce as much oil as you want as long as it doesn’t create more than X number of emissions.” It was a clever way to force industrial emitters to invest in carbon storage, carbon capture, and if they couldn’t do so, they would lose money long term. Despite their promise to make the industrial carbon pricing more robust, it seems to be a cynical political move that is designed to, once again, kneecap the conservatives.

In fact, there’s a lot in here that is clearly designed to kneecap the conservatives. The tax cut, the emissions cap, the tax incentives for energy corporations… They’re decreasing red tape, and expediting regulatory frameworks, they’re basically taking every policy proposal by the conservatives outside of “destroy our institutions” and they’re making the conservatives look dumb. They have absolutely flanked the Conservative Party, and with the minister crossing floor, and more possibly doing the same. This government sees an enemy, and they’re aiming to make them look like clowns at every turn.

The environment is getting absolutely ravaged in this document as well. It’s pretty much the end of the progress we’ve made around the environment in the past decade, and we should kiss our climate goals goodbye. This budget has no interest in supporting the indigenous, with tools to bypass much regulatory frameworks, and barely seems interested in supporting the historical progress Canada has made with our First Nations since 2015.

I didn’t talk about the defense budget increase, because I don’t know how I feel about it. I think about nordic countries, social democracies that overall match with my politics (except the crazy racism.) A lot of Europe has major defense budgets, and many have mandatory service.

In the 20 or so countries mandatory military service, it’s mostly just administrative staffing. I dunno, we might get invaded by an increasingly fascist United States. Maybe we should be ready for it. That’s clearly what Carney is thinking.

An actual good use of the military is as a centralized logic machine. In the budget, they’re spending a quarter of a billion on jets to help with aerial support for forest fires. That being said, is it realistic to think the Canadian government will use military as a logistic machine? I’m doubtful. It’s also cutting into programs that need more funding, like housing and health care.

I guess what I’m saying is that a highly efficient socialist government with strong, centralized social systems might be able to invest in the military. If we had governments that worked as well as Norway, sure. Right now I think it’s a bad idea to invest in military, because I question the intention of these investments, and this money needs to go into fixing our institutions.

My conclusion of the budget:

It’s a big shrug, and it feels like a budget that could have been posed by Mulroney or Chrétien at their most neo-liberal, with incremental progress in some ways, and some steps backwards in other ways. The huge wealth transfer is a big cause for panic, especially considering our weakened social systems, and the overreliance on PPPs are going to cost the government huge amounts of money without building the expertise we need to transition into a system that works for the people of the country.