EDITORIAL: PM’s economic update was a snow job

Annette Ryan: Update raised far more questions than it answers

Published May 07, 2026  •  Last updated 50 minutes ago  •  2 minute read

Parliamentary Budget Officer Annette Ryan attends a Standing Senate Committee on National Finance in Ottawa on May 5, 2026. Photo by Hyungcheol Park /Postmedia Network

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s spring economic update can best be described as treating Canadian taxpayers like mushrooms.

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That is, by keeping them in the dark and covering them with manure.

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As parliamentary budget officer Annette Ryan reported in her assessment of the update, it raised far more questions than it answers.

Among her findings:

Carney’s explanation of his $25-billion Canada Strong Fund (aka the sovereign wealth fund) lacks key information needed to evaluate it despite being financed by government debt. (Normally such funds are financed by surpluses, which the federal government doesn’t have). Among other concerns, the update does not address whether interest payments on the added government debt will be weighed against the fund’s performance.

No details are provided on how Carney plans to reach his NATO target of spending 5% of GDP on defence by 2035, which the PBO estimates will cost $159 billion in that year alone, add $63 billion to the deficit and increase the debt-to-GDP ratio by 6.3 percentage points, one of several factors contributing to “a concerning upward track” on government debt.

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It’s impossible to evaluate Carney’s promise to balance the federal operating deficit in 2028-29 because it hasn’t provided needed information about what it views as operating expenses versus capital investments. (The previous PBO said Carney improperly labelled $94 billion of operating expenses as capital investments, and that, accounted for properly, the government will fail to balance the operating budget as promised.)

The effectiveness of Carney’s major projects office, which is supposed to fast-track approvals of nationally significant infrastructure projects within two years, can’t be assessed because it hasn’t published any progress reports or developed a scorecard to track progress on its two-year mandate.

Carney’s promise in the November 2025 budget committing $110 billion over five years to increase economic productivity — a key determinant of Canadians’ standard of living which has been flat since 2022 — lacks the metrics needed to assess progress.

While the spring economic update claims the government’s expenditure review program requiring 45 federal agencies to achieve financial savings of up to 15% over three years is “well underway,” it doesn’t provide any information on actual savings achieved in the current fiscal year, nor any data on the size of the reduction in the public service.

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