JAY GOLDBERG: Mark Carney wants your trust, not your questions

Canadians don’t know the full cost to taxpayers of three large projects

Published Jul 09, 2026  •  Last updated 38 minutes ago  •  3 minute read

Prime Minister Mark Carney. Photo by Blair Gable /Postmedia Network

Money seems to mean nothing to our leadership in Ottawa these days.

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Over the past couple of weeks, Prime Minister Mark Carney has been jetting around making announcement after announcement.

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He has announced roughly $100 billion in new spending since the House of Commons broke for the summer, one of the largest waves of spending announcements outside the pandemic.

This includes $30 billion in increased annual defence spending by 2030, between $35.2 billion and $43.7 billion for a new pipeline from Alberta to B.C.’s southern coast, and roughly $20 billion in new spending to pacify B.C.’s NDP government, which has long complained about the amount the Carney government intends to invest in an Alberta pipeline at the expense of taxpayers elsewhere.

All these announcements came with vague price tags, minimal financial details, and little explanation of where the money is coming from.

Considering that the Carney government plans to run deficits of at least $50 billion in each of the next five years, announcements of this scale deserve a great deal of scrutiny.

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Don Drummond, a professor at Queen’s University School of Policy Studies and someone who has been involved in federal budgets for the past 50 years, faulted the Carney government for its lack of transparency.

“I’ve been involved with budgets in one way or another since 1977 and I’ve never seen such a lack of transparency,” Drummond told The Globe and Mail.

Drummond is part of the C.D. Howe Institute’s annual shadow budget, a project in which economists try to come up with the size of the federal deficit before the budget is tabled.

“We’re trying to generate a ’status quo’ fiscal update, and we do not know what to do,” said Drummond. “Are these loans? Are they loan guarantees? Are they actual capital purchases, which, under accrual accounting, we just record as amortization? The answer to all of the above is ‘I don’t know.’ ”

And if Drummond doesn’t know, no one does.

Despite three major spending announcements, Canadians still don’t know the full cost to taxpayers, how the commitments will be financed, or what impact they will have on future deficits.

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The Conservative Party of Canada’s newly minted finance critic, Michael Chong, criticized the Carney government’s lack of transparency.

In pointing to the same three announcements, Chong said: “Each of these spending announcements raises questions that Mr. Carney must provide answers to: How much will taxes have to go up to pay for this? How much will social programs have to be cut? How much will increased interest payments on the national debt burden our children?”

These are all fair questions and they are all questions that Carney and Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne ought to be answering.

But it appears as though the federal Liberal government has no intention of answering Drummond’s, Chong’s or Canadians’ questions.

Carney appears to want to operate a “trust me” version of government. Whether it’s in regulating the internet, making grand foreign policy pledges, or announcing literally $100 billion in new spending, Canadians are too often expected to accept sweeping decisions without the details needed to judge them.

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The message is clear enough: Trust the government’s judgment now and ask questions later.

But that’s not how responsible government is supposed to work.

“Trust me” government has never worked. When politicians aren’t accountable to the people, bad decisions and insular thinking inevitably follow. Being forthright about government decision-making shouldn’t be optional, especially when tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake. Unfortunately, the Carney Liberals have yet to demonstrate that they see it that way.

It’s time for Canadians to demand better. We deserve to know the details, especially when it comes to mortgaging our children’s future. Governments don’t earn trust by asking for it; they earn it through openness and accountability. Until the Carney government starts providing both, Canadians have every reason to keep asking hard questions.

Dr. Jay Goldberg is a political scientist and a fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

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