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FOR SUBSCRIBERS | NOVEMBER 4, 2025 |
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Prime Minister Mark Carney makes a live address on Canada's plan to build a stronger economy in advance of the 2025 budget, at the University of Ottawa on Oct. 22, 2025. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick |
Much Weighs on Canada’s Upcoming Federal Budget |
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Commentary
As has been widely publicized, including by me, the whole country is awaiting the narrowly re-elected Liberal government’s long-delayed budget on Nov. 4. The reason for this is not that unusual numbers of Canadians are fascinated by the minutiae of fiscal matters. It is because all public-minded Canadians and all those outside Canada who have any serious interest in this country need to know whether the new prime minister brings to office with him those policy goals and enthusiasms that most marked his previous career.
Carney is unambiguously known as a rigorous and unconditional believer in the necessity to reduce fossil fuel use to zero as soon as is humanly possible. In his six months in office, in addition to rising public skepticism about these policies, he has also seen some evidence of the increasing doubts in climate-learned circles about the basic premises of his long-held, stridently advocated green positions.
If fully implemented, Carney’s long-standing green program would negatively affect the financial standing and market value of all public companies that fail to meet an arbitrary executive standard for promotion of what is called sustainability. It would seriously reduce Canada’s rate of economic growth and escalate the strangulation of the oil and gas industry, the country’s leading engine for economic growth. His program would sharply increase the cost of essential energy for transportation, home heating, and air conditioning.
In this unusually long and tranquil six-month honeymoon that he has enjoyed, Mr. Carney has intermittently spoken of accommodations to fear of climate change as a “unique opportunity” for Canada, and has praised “climate resiliency” and spoken of “carbon-neutral pipelines.” These are incomprehensible concepts in themselves. The burning question is whether the rhetorical retreat into such vagueness constitutes an orderly and even slightly elegant retreat behind a smokescreen toward a new policy that he yields to and seizes political and economic realities, while placating his longtime allies among the climate warriors as best he can with intimations of a strategic deferral of drastic steps.
All the various factions are uneasily awaiting the government’s budget, which it is assumed will have to give some indication of where it is coming down on a series of pressing issues. These include the deficit, the proposed defence budget increase, the fate of our faltering health-care system, and how far we are going to allow the indigenous victimhood industry to usurp the legitimacy of the status of the 97.5 percent of non-indigenous citizens of this country. But nothing is awaited with more suspense than the discovery of whether the government is going to ride a comparatively liberated energy industry to greater general prosperity, or continue to persecute that industry at the expense of economic growth, per capita income, and national unity. |
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The most impatient and politically explosive element in this complicated equation was out in strength on Oct. 25 at the “I am Alberta” rally in front of the Alberta legislature in Edmonton, organized by the Alberta Prosperity Project. Police estimated that there were about 20,000 demonstrators, a respectable turnout on a cool autumn day in this relatively undemonstrative country. Polls currently indicate that about 35 percent of Albertans favour the outright independence of their province, and that approximately an equal number are undecided. This makes the current running on this issue, which has received almost no publicity around the country but which could define the future of the country, about a dead heat. (A clear majority of Premier Smith’s governing United Conservatives appear to be independentists.)
Canadians from other provinces should recall that Alberta, over the years, has paid approximately $70 billion in equalization payments, chiefly for the benefit of Quebec (where all polls now indicate that separatists are likely to form the next government, though that does not necessarily mean that they will succeed in separating). Nothing is more easily understandable than Albertans’ wish to know if the federal government is going to retard the province’s economic growth or encourage it, and with it the general prosperity of the country, depending upon the degree of credence it attaches to saturnine and heavily disputed conjurations of climatological scenarios.
Even Albertans who do not remember the days of Pierre Trudeau 40 years ago are aware of his efforts to seize most of the profitability of the oil and gas industry. This seems to have particularly aggravated their state of disenchantment when his son, as prime minister in the last decade, set out to shut that industry down as incompatible with the future of the planet. The wheels are now coming off the exaggerated and often hysterical arguments of the climate alarmists, in all four directions. Many sources of dire predictions have been debunked as unjustified speculation or outright fraud. There is certainly climate change, but it is so far well within traditional cycles of such change and the extent to which the temperature is influenced by the actions of people remains very uncertain.
The prodigious efforts to reduce carbon emissions have been generally unsuccessful and have been ignored except by the United States, in all of the countries where the greatest carbon use occurs: China (first), India (third), and Russia (fourth). As of now, 81 percent of world energy is still supplied by fossil fuels, and the influence upon this number in Canada is negligible, so the effort deployed to this end is symbolic: the most vapid form of what would be virtue signalling if we had any legitimate assurance that it was even virtuous. Practically all international goals for fossil fuel reduction have been abandoned, and the annual United Nations leaders’ conference on the issue, where Mr. Carney was active for some time, is now poorly attended and practically irrelevant.
The world is in a state of long-delayed reassessment. If Mr. Carney gets on board with that, cobbles together as best he can an exhortation to his climate followers of patience pending confirmation or otherwise of their worst climate fears and most vivid ambitions, Nov. 4 could be a noteworthy turning point. Canada’s comparative economic decline could be transformed into the resumption of its long-term and rather uplifting growth.
Canadians should be aware of the material proportions of Albertans’ admirable forbearance. It is naturally a very rich province of over 5 million people, a larger population and a much larger area than many well-established countries such as Finland, Denmark, and Norway. If it fulfilled the requirements of the 1999 Clarity Act, clearly posed the question of whether the population wished to secede from Canada, and a clear and substantial majority voted in the affirmative, this would be entirely legal and incontestable under Canadian law.
Effective almost immediately, Alberta would not be burdened with federal income tax or with equalization payments and would have the means to endow itself with an outstanding health-care system while sharply reducing or abolishing personal income tax. It would immediately become both a petrostate and a tax-haven state, but with a substantially integrated economy easily distinguishable from such places as Qatar, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Monaco, and other small states based entirely on riches in energy and tax policy. It could undoubtedly sell all of its oil and gas either to, or by revival of, the XL pipeline through the United States. The endless and unspeakably irritating dithering over pipeline construction, violation of alleged native burial grounds en route, or whether nearly 500 years after Jacques Cartier discovered the St. Lawrence River, we can get oil tankers safely out of our harbours, would all retreat into the happy void of forgetfulness.
This is the enviable fate that Alberta has so far resisted out of its admirable and insufficiently gratefully appreciated patriotic attachment to Canada. One can only hope that Mr. Carney and his colleagues realize the stakes they are playing for when they lift the veil, at least partially, on their proposed fiscal budget next week.
No one is watching the budget as closely as Alberta, and no one is watching Alberta as closely as the government of Quebec is. If Alberta runs out of patience, Quebec would follow, astounding the country by its ingratitude.
The future of this country is now at stake. |
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