Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday in his first Question Period appearance in a week sat silently as Conservative MPs recited stories of jobless workers. Carney repeatedly wished Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre a happy 47th birthday in an attempt to be lighthearted: “Will the Prime Minister stop being so flippant about the suffering he has caused?”
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Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne misled Canadians on the size of his near-record 2025 deficit, Budget Office figures disclosed yesterday. Analysts said there is now a 99 percent chance the finance department will miss ongoing targets: “What credibility do you think you have on any fiscal matter?”
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The Parliamentary watchdog crunched the numbers and warned that Canada’s deficit is set to double. The budgetary deficit nearly doubled (+98.3%) from 2024-25 to $72.0 billion in 2025-26. The PBO projects this will push the deficit-to-GDP from 1.2% to 2.2% over the same period. A sharp climb, but necessary due to fallout from the US-led trade war, right? Not exactly.
Revenue slipped 0.56% (-$2.9 billion) to $508.1 billion, notes the report. Higher commodity prices should have helped cushion revenues, but the benefit was overwhelmed by explosive spending growth. Expenses climbed 6.0% (+$32.1 billion) to $580.1 billion over the same period. The PBO attributes $68.4 billion in net new spending between now and 2031 to new measures.
“…as modest revenue growth is outpaced by growth in expenses — largely reflecting the introduction of new measures,” explains the PBO.
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PBO Annette Ryan, in her economic and fiscal update for June, estimates last year’s deficit will be $72 billion (2.2% of GDP) when the final numbers come in for the 2025-26 fiscal year (April 1 2025 to March 31 2026).
That’s double the $36.3 billion deficit (1.2% of GDP) the Liberals reported in 2024-2025 and $5.1 billion higher than the $66.9 billion deficit Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne projected on April 28, the PBO reports, “as modest revenue growth is outpaced by growth in expenses – largely reflecting the introduction of new measures.”
For the next five years, the PBO projects, federal deficits will average $4.6 billion higher annually than the government’s April projections, “reflecting lower revenues, particularly personal income tax, and higher program expenses, partially offset by lower public debt charges.”
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When Carney released his first budget in November 2025, he said he was going to spend $588 billion in 2026. Then he released the Spring Economic Update at the end of April and hiked spending to about $595 billion, which means Carney was already overbudget by more than $6 billion.
A little over one month later, Carney is another $6 billion over budget compared to his spring update, according to a report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
Carney’s campaign platform said “the federal government has been spending too much.”
Going over budget twice in one year is the opposite of fixing that problem. And that’s going over budget on a plan that projected Carney spending $21 billion more than former prime minister Justin Trudeau planned to spend in 2026.
Carney gave himself an open net and still managed to miss. Twice.
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To get this help, you need to qualify for the GST rebate, which means an income of $56,181 or less for a single person with no children or $66,841 or less for a couple with two children. Essentially, you need to be living at or just above the poverty line to receive this payment.
About 45% of recipients are either between the ages of 19-24 or over the age of 65, despite these age groups only amounting to just over 25% of the Canadian population.
This is great for those people but that is not where most Canadian families live. The PM is trying to make it sound like he’s helping average families with the cost of groceries.
“We are laser focused on affordability for Canadians, for Canadian families, providing them with a boost today and a bridge to that better tomorrow,” Carney said at a photo-op to mark the new payments.
Meanwhile, average families continue to face out-of-control food prices. The basket of groceries that cost you $100 five years ago now costs you $130.
The rise for some individual items, as detailed in the latest inflation report is staggering. Tomatoes up 20.9% compared to a year earlier while coffee is up 15.5%, beef is up 12.5%, carrots are up 10.5%, and pork is up 9.4%.
An average family in Brampton that is dealing with these rising costs won’t be getting this help because they make too much money. The median household income in Brampton is over $110,000, or more than $40,000 above the cut-off, but they are still dealing with higher grocery costs.
“We’re building Canada strong for all,” Carney said.
I wish this were the case, but it’s not.
Canada’s economy is in recession according to Stats Canada data. The PM can claim that it’s only a “technical” recession if he wants, but even he said when he was Governor of the Bank of England that a recession was two quarters of flat or negative growth.
Our unemployment rate fell in the numbers released on Friday, but it is still stubbornly high at 6.6%. Bankruptcies have increased by 10% in the latest report compared to a year ago.
Eric Kam, an economics professor at Toronto Metropolitan University dismissed the claim that Canada either isn’t in a recession or just a technical recession as fantasy and wordsmithing.
“I don’t want to hear anything more about technical recessions any more than I want to hear someone tell me they’re technically pregnant,” Kam told me in an interview. “The reality is the Canadian economy has been heading in the wrong direction for about eleven years.”
A healthy economy wouldn’t need a government program to help pay for groceries. People would do it themselves with jobs, higher wages and inflation that was manageable.
We don’t have that.
We have an economy that is sputtering, and a government with tired and failing ideas on how to fix that.
The expert, none other than the Food Professor, or Sylvain Charlebois, who runs an agri-food lab at Dalhousie University, expressed the severity of this statistic on X — "Nearly one in four Canadians is struggling to put food on the table."
The number has steadily risen from 19% in 2023 to 24% in 2026.
These numbers are indicators something is awry — as Charlebois puts it, "Yet we're still debating whether we're in a recession."
For many households, that debate is already over."
Though many are feeling the pressure, surprisingly 39% of Canadians say they feel they are worse off than they were last year, a decrease from 43% in 2023, and 44% in 2024.
This however, seems to be more about perceived hardship and potentially an indication of what Canadians are used to, as the FBC states, affordability levels "remain high."
Of those spending more than 30% of their income on housing 42% of people said this was the case — up from 36% in 2023.
Canadians also had increased trouble getting access to healthcare this year with 24% claiming to have this issue — another jump from 19% in 2023.
The poverty rate stayed steady at its 2024 level of 11%, but another stark jump from its 2023 baseline of 7.4%.
When comparing provinces, Quebec had the lowest poverty rate in the country at 7%, with Nunavut with the highest rate 31.7%.
Most know the current unemployment rate in the country is 6.7% up from 5% in 2023.
Overall the lowest unemployment rate was in Saskatchewan at 5% and the highest was in Newfoundland and Labrador at 9.5%.
Tax Freedom Day — the day Canadians stop working to pay their taxes and start earning money for themselves — arrives on Tuesday, June 9 this year, according to an annual survey by the Fraser Institute.
“If Canadians paid all their taxes up front, they would work the first 159 days of the year before bringing any money home for themselves and their families,” said Jake Fuss, the Fraser Institute’s director of fiscal studies, noting it arrives one day later this year than in 2025.
The calculation includes taxes imposed by federal, provincial and municipal governments, including income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, sin taxes, fuel taxes, carbon taxes, import duties and other taxes, levies and fees often hidden from the public or difficult to calculate.
The Fraser Institute says federal taxes account for 56.9% of the total tax bill, provincial taxes 37% and municipal taxes 6.2%.
It says an average Canadian family comprised of two or more people with an annual income of $166,790 will pay $72,539 in total taxes this year, or 43.5% of its income.
In this example, $25,352 of the total tax burden is the result of income taxes; $17,069 payroll and health taxes; $10,519 sales taxes; $4,939 property taxes; $7,819 profit taxes; $2,182 sin taxes; $1,137 fuel, vehicle and carbon taxes and $3,522 in other taxes.
Families and unattached individuals with an annual income of $123,757 will pay $52,220 in total taxes, or 42.2% of their income.
A family of four (two parents and two children) with an annual income of $202,885 will pay $85,315 in total taxes, or 42.1% of their income.
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