Tag Archives: CSIS

Budget Day 2026

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It was Budget Day, and of course, because it’s 1995 and will always be 1995, the headlines are always about the deficit. (Budget document here). It turns out that the deficit for the current fiscal year is about half of the earlier projection, thanks to increased revenues (in large part because of high oil prices), and it’s being kept steady for the next few years while the government once again took up the increased revenue to fund a bunch of things, most especially their Mega Deduction.

Budget 2026 in one graph

— Trevor Tombe (@trevortombe.bsky.social) 2026-11-05T22:18:11.388246+00:00

Budget 2026 sees federal debt dropping to 19% of GDP by 2060; I get ~48%. #cdnecon #cdnpoliTwo key differences: net debt doesn’t subtract non-financial assets (capital), and I assume we meet the new NATO target. Long-term fiscal challenges may be bigger than budget implies.

— Trevor Tombe (@trevortombe.bsky.social) 2026-11-06T00:55:34.329048+00:00

ok, here's what underlies the whole document. This is a HUGE windfall relative to the Spring Economic Update. Add up the extra and it is $186B. That's how they piled on so much extra spending AND lowered the deficit forecast.Easy to do with +$186B in your pocket!

— Kevin Milligan (@kevinmilligan.bsky.social) 2026-11-06T00:56:50.939Z

Some highlights of the coverage:

  • $52 billion to double electrical capacity by 2050—and considering this a climate plan
  • Plans to extend the open banking framework to other sectors, while still delaying the actual open banking implementation.
  • More tax breaks for tech CEOs, because “innovation.” Also, EDC and BDC are merging.
  • $400 million more for military drones, plus more funding for space launch capacity.
  • A few more details on the “Canada Strong” sovereign wealth fund.
  • New laws to “streamline” expropriations for the Alto high speed rail project.
  • The hope is for the tax breaks and incentives to create an “investment super-cycle”
  • There is $5 billion for culture, including CBC and journalism.
  • There is a promise of $6 billion for CSIS, possibly the largest increase in funding ever.
  • The budget aims to work with provinces to end homelessness in ten years. 
  • There is also $50 billion over ten years for Indigenous programmes and services.
  • The budget doesn’t give any clues as to the future of health transfers.
  • Immigration levels are to be kept largely the same, with plans to convert 200,000 temporary residents to permanent residents. 
  • There remain unanswered questions about the path to meeting NATO targets.

Reaction from the opposition has been pretty much as expected—Pierre Poilievre is howling that the deficits will fuel inflation (which is not what is happening with inflation), while Avi Lewis demands a wealth tax (that won’t generate the revenue he claims) and for it to be spent on “lowering the cost of groceries” (no, subsidizing a “public option” is not actually lowering the cost) and building more housing (for unrealistic amounts of money). 

Budget commentary includes:

  • Justin Ling delves into the promises for drone production.
  • Kevin Carmichael points to the signals the budget sends to the bond markets.
  • Susan Delacourt sees the government taking the cue about affordability.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-11-05T20:08:02.591Z

My Latest:

My column looks at all of Mark Carney’s talk about “values” in foreign policy and wonders when we might actually see some—other than “making money.”

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Scoring points off the interest rate decision

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The Bank of Canada raised their policy rate 25 basis points yesterday to 2.5 percent, and as you might expect, the political reaction was bordering on unhinged. The Bank governor’s reasoning was pretty clear—global oil prices are pushing headline inflation up, and while core inflation is on target (meaning the measures that strip out the most volatile components), there is concern that businesses that are currently absorbing the increased fuel costs are going to start passing those costs on through the economy. The rate hike is more of a signal than anything—it can’t do anything about the Strait of Hormuz, but it can send a signal to the economy that the Bank isn’t going to take risings costs lying down, and they’re going to do their part to rein them in. That’s the thing about monetary policy—it’s as  much about sending signals to the market and being willing to back them up with its levers than anything.

For the opposition parties, however, reading apparently isn’t their strong suit. The Conservatives insisted that this was all about the government’s “out of control” spending and deficits, and that’s what is fuelling inflation, all of which is absolute hokum. Tiff Macklem was quite clear in the statement that what’s driving the inflation are global factors, meaning oil prices. The NDP, however, insisted that “This is a clear result of the Liberal government’s failure to get inflation under control.” First of all, managing inflation is the Bank’s job, not the government’s. And second of all, core inflation is on target. Inflation is under control. The spike in the headline number is entirely gasoline prices, which we do not control. And then they took a gratuitous shot about Carney’s initial support for the war in Iran. The cherry on top is that the government is refusing to actually dispute any of the absolutely false things the opposition is saying, and are instead patting themselves on the back for the Bank’s growth projections, because that’ll combat disinformation!

The releases from the Conservatives and NDP are both written from fantasylands that didn't read anything the Bank wrote. The Bank said nothing about deficits or government spending. They did say the source of inflation was global oil prices. Both parties ignored those facts.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-10-28T20:26:21.043Z

I'm forced to conclude that either our opposition finance critics are illiterate, or they simply lie in order to fit their narratives—likely the latter. Meanwhile, the prime minister is a former central banker but didn't bother to cite the Bank's language in QP today.We are so absolutely boned.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-10-28T20:26:21.044Z

It is frankly distressing to see just how absolutely economically illiterate the “finance critics” of our opposition parties are. I know that you have narratives that you want to push, but you don’t have to lie to the public to try and make your point. You can be concerned about the size of the deficit without lying that it is driving inflation (when core inflation is on target!) and that it forced the interest rate hike. You can express concerns about the war in Iran pushing up prices without saying that the government didn’t get inflation under control (when again, core inflation is on target! FFS!) This should not be rocket science, and yet, here we are. We don’t have to keep making this the dumbest timeline. These kinds of statements are a choice.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-10-28T13:08:06.166Z

My Latest:

My column explores the notion that the BC election is a sign that it’s time for “normie” conservatives to be in ascendance, and why that is not necessarily the case.

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Roundup: Authoritarian theatre, separatist referendum edition

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Danielle Smith’s attempt to engineer a separation referendum in Alberta went entirely off the rails yesterday in one of the most cynical yet spectacular ways yesterday. The legislative committee that is supposed to make the determination on the petition process met yesterday, in a somewhat desperate move, to consider the Forever Canada petition, which Smith has been poised to weaponise as her referendum because it wouldn’t require First Nations consultation because it’s framed in the positive of remaining in Canada. Never mind that petition author and former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk doesn’t actually want this as a referendum—he wants it to be a vote in the legislature, so that the UCP owns it. Nevertheless, midway through the meeting, the UCP sent out a press release saying that they had agreed to turn this into a referendum, complete with quotes from the chair, when no votes had been taken.

And then all hell broke loose. The UCP sent out a note to disregard the press release, while inside the committee, NDP members were moving points of privilege which will need to be adjudicated by the Speaker of the Assembly. It also turns out that Danielle Smith had booked airtime tonight, so this entirely looks like the fix was in, and that the committee process was merely authoritarian theatre to manufacture consent, so that Smith can continue to placate the separatists in her base. The whole thing is both cowardly on Smith’s part, and just amateurish beyond belief.

Now we know.Smith committed to give separatists a referendum. She pre-recorded her tomorrow’s TV address, before the Legislature committee had a chance to vote on the #ForeverCanadian petition. UCP sent out a press release on a vote that didn’t happen, while they supposedly listened to me#ableg

— Hon. Thomas A. Lukaszuk (@lukaszukab.bsky.social) 2026-05-21T00:17:52.059Z

But there is a point to this amateurishness, which Jen Gerson points out here—these people think that they’re strategic geniuses for engineering conservative victories in Alberta, and so they’re overconfident in their abilities. Jason Kenney was, and lo, the leopards he let into the house at his face, while Smith has tied herself into so many knots to try and placate those same leopards in the hope that they won’t eat their face, while they are staring at her and licking their chops, but she insists that she’s the strategic genius here. None of this is going to end well, in part because these are deeply stupid and unserious people, and the country is going to suffer as a result.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-05-20T19:08:01.746Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian missile, drone and artillery attacks on Dnipro killed two and injured six. Ukraine is bolstering their northern defences over concerns of a planned new attack on Kyiv. Oil refining in central Russia is at a standstill thanks to Ukrainian attacks.

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Roundup: Mixed messages about deeper integration

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Late last week, prime minister Mark Carney was at the Global Progress Action Summit in Toronto, and gave a speech that seems to be a bit of a Rorschach test about how you feel about him and the job he’s doing. While I believe he’s correct in saying that the loss of control people feel with affordability and the rise of digital asbestos leads to a “politics of grievance,” I am less convinced the same is true for immigration, and that it has proven a reliable scapegoat by everyone, Carney included, which is absolutely dangerous—especially when he uses phrases like “taking back control.” He also says that the current moment has been “seized by politicians who seek to destroy and dismantle and progressives must answer by building,” but he has been eroding and quietly dismantling the actual progressive programmes brought in by his predecessor. The fact that he is calling himself a “progressive” is stretching the definition to its breaking point.

Amidst this, there was another statement that raises even more eyebrows, which is that “Like Mexico, Canada remains open to deeper integration, including options for fortress North America in (certain) sectors. And to be clear, those offers are on the table.” Deeper integration? Fortress North America? So, after all of the talk about how being solely dependent on the US as a single trading partner has been a strategic weakness and that we need to diversify so that we have options and can’t be held hostage, we want to integrate even more closely in strategic sectors with the same country that has been trying to hold us hostage, threatening our sovereignty, and which has taken to bullying us because they think they can get away with it without consequence? I mean, I get that we cannot fully decouple from the US because of geography (and even Taiwan trades mostly with China, because of geography), but this message seems at odds with everything happening, and it’s really hard to see how he can promise this without some pretty heavy caveats up front, and I’m not exactly seeing anything that inspires me with confidence.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-05-10T23:08:01.480Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia violated the ceasefire by making drone strikes on the front lines, and Ukraine launched a few drones in response. Putin claims the war will be winding down soon, but said they will be victorious, but are even further away from their aims, so we’ll see. Here is a look into the dispute between Ukraine and Israel over shipments of stolen grain, and why Israel is uncomfortably close to Russia.

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Roundup: A call to ignore Pathways

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In a sit-down interview with The Canadian Press, prime minister Mark Carney says that an oil pipeline out of Alberta is “more likely than not,” and this doesn’t mean the revived Keystone XL (aka “Bridger Pipeline”). But he’s also not saying anything about Pathways, which is a bit suspicious because he tied the approval to Pathways getting underway, and industry has made it very clear they’re not interested in paying for it.

To that end, who showed up in the op-ed pages of the Globe and Mail but Martha Hall Findlay, former Liberal MP and now head of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, who put on a big show to say that she found it hard to write, but lo, she must recommend that the government “pause” Pathways, because it’s useless on a global scale, and “the world changed.” And then there was more hand-wringing and rationalization that Canada is such a small contributor to global emissions that it doesn’t matter.

The world didn’t change. Facts didn’t change. Climate change didn’t stop with the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, so quite frankly, this is bullshit and special pleading. The notion that we don’t contribute enough to global emissions is such a poor argument because it’s a common action problem. We have some of the highest emissions on a per capita basis, and yes, that matters. Hall Findlay was going on about how this is all about ego, and we just want to look like we’re leaders, but guess what—every action matters. And if you think that it’s too expensive to reduce emissions now, well, it’s going to be even more expensive the longer we push it down the road, when the effects are even more entrenched globally. We’re already spending billions of dollars in insurance payouts every year that are directly related to climate. The vast majority of food price inflation is climate-related, even if people don’t want to admit it. Frankly, these arguments of hers are tired and baseless and not worth listening to, no matter how much she insists she still believes in climate action…eventually.

My favourite moment in any oil price shock cycle is when the Very Serious Energy People explain why this — again! — is not the time to give a shit about the climate crisis

— Chris Turner (@theturner.bsky.social) 2026-05-01T15:21:29.234Z

If Canada can make that argument at 1.4% then presumably so can Saudi Arabia (1.5), Iran (1.9) and Japan (2.0).Then I imagine both Indonesia (2.3) and Brazil (2.5) would say, "hey, us too." And at that point, you've ruled out 204 countries accounting for roughly 46% of all national emissions.

— Aaron Wherry (@aaronwherry.bsky.social) 2026-05-01T15:02:42.580Z

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-05-01T19:08:02.330Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched yet another attack on port infrastructure in Odesa early Friday, and then launched more than 400 drones in a daytime attack that injured ten people in Ternopil in the west. Ukraine is planning an overhaul of its military rotations, particularly after an outcry over images of emaciated soldiers emerged.

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Roundup: Boulerice reaches for the exit

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Multiple sources have confirmed to multiple news outlets that NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice is about to pull the plug and make the jump to provincial politics, running for Québec Solidaire in the upcoming election. Boulerice is the sole survivor of the 2011 “Orange Wave” that swept Quebec and made inroads into metro Toronto, but in many ways, Boulerice has been a reminder of the party’s failure to capitalise on the gains they made in that election, particularly in Quebec.

The most obvious failure was the party’s inability to cultivate grassroots in the province. Riding associations in most of the province existed on paper only, and they had a habit of running paper candidates for the sole purpose of being able to say they ran candidates in every riding so that they could maximise their spending caps. In the 2011 election, you had a group of McGill students who were placed as paper candidates in several ridings they had never visited, as well as a bar manager from Carleton University, and because of the fluke of Quebec voting emotionally for “Le Bon Jack” after Jack Layton had his bout of cancer and he would wave his cane everywhere, these paper candidates won. But did they do the work of actually building grassroots organisations at this point? Nope. Because the NDP is a party where they consider their federal and provincial wings to be the same organisation, they tend to leave their provincial wings to do the grassroots organising, and well, there isn’t a provincial NDP in Quebec, and so they didn’t, and they paid for it when Quebec’s mood shifted.

The party did try to start up a provincial wing at one point, running candidates in a provincial election, but they failed miserably and got nowhere with it, in part because the NDP didn’t know what it wanted to be in Quebec, where there is already a crowded field that is complicated by federalist, separatist and (ethnic) nationalist convictions, and I seem to recall there was a whole issue of trying to discern just which Quebec NDP MPs were actually separatists. Suffice to say, that provincial failure still wasn’t enough of a lesson for them, and their only anchor in the province was Boulerice, and now he’s leaving. Avi Lewis has ruled himself out of running in that riding (which they will likely lose), and in Beaches—East York once Nate Erskine-Smith steps down in the coming weeks, meaning he is going to make himself irrelevant much the way that Jagmeet Singh did when he won his own leadership contest. If anything, this makes the job of rebuilding the party’s fortunes even harder, and there aren’t enough Zohran Mamdani gimmicks in the world that they can imitate to fix that.

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian drone attack on Odesa early Friday killed an elderly couple and wounded more than a dozen others. There was a prisoner exchange yesterday, swapping 193 captured personnel on each side. President Zelenskyy was in Saudi Arabia to develop their new security agreement. Here is a look at the problems facing Chernobyl after drone strikes in the area.

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Roundup: Moving the majority motion

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Government House Leader Steven announced yesterday that he will be moving a motion in the House of Commons today regarding changing the committee make-up for the remainder of this parliament in order to reflect the government’s new majority status, which feels a little bit like jumping the gun. While he does need to give notice of the motion, it won’t be debated until next week sometime at the earliest (because Thursday is a Supply Day for one of the Opposition Parties, and I doubt he would debate this motion on a Friday), but there’s no way the government can vote on it yet. Why? Because the three new MPs haven’t been sworn in yet, and it’s generally a three-to-four-week process for Elections Canada to fully certify the results and report back to the Commons so that the swearing-in can happen, and well, it’s only been a week-and-a-half.

I do find it interesting that they have decided to go the route of adding MPs to the committees to make them twelve members instead of ten, which may be a mistake on the government’s part. Yes, removing a Conservative instead of adding a Liberal to each committee might have seen them howl more, but the things is, we actually barely have enough MPs to go around when it comes to staffing committees properly (remember, this is the reason why official party status is twelve MPs—so that they can have coverage on every standing committee). During Trudeau’s majority parliament, committees were down to ten MPs, which meant that parliamentary secretaries didn’t have to be voting members, which is better for all because they couldn’t essentially be putting their thumbs on the scales on the government’s behalf, but when they were back to minority parliaments, committee memberships went back up to 12 in order to accommodate more opposition members, thus meaning parliamentary secretaries were back to voting members. It looks like Carney and MacKinnon have no problem with this, even though they should—it’s bad form for the independence of committees, but they don’t actually care about that.

It also looks like MacKinnon is doing this now and not later is a power move. I had previously suspected that this move wouldn’t be fully implemented until autumn because the last four sitting weeks before summer would have the committees slammed to get things passed before the break, but now they’re going to mess up their ability to work until the Procedure and House Affairs Committee can produce their report on the new committee memberships because the Conservatives decided to play stupid games on the Ethics committee and force a vote on making François-Philippe Champagne appear before them to answer theatrical questions about his non-existent conflict of interest with the Alto high speed rail project. By pushing this motion and vote to as soon as the government can make it, once the new MPs are sworn-in, it gives them a chance to try and head off the committee before Champagne appears for the sole purpose of having the Conservatives (and probably Bloc) call him corrupt on camera so that they can get clicks on their social media channels. Just ridiculous, and even more ridiculous that MacKinnon has to get in on the dick-swinging in the process.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-04-21T19:08:01.767Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia claims to have captured 80 settlements and 1700 square kilometres since the start of the year, while Ukraine has recaptured some of that territory back. As Ukraine is about to resume pumping oil through the Druzhba pipeline to Hungary, now that repairs are completed, it looks like Ukrainian drone attacks have reduced Russian oil export capacity by 300,000 to 400,000 barrels per day.

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Roundup: Carney’s Forward Guidance

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On Sunday morning, prime minister Mark Carney released a ten-minute piece on his YouTube channel called “Forward Guidance,” because he’s still doing his central banker shtick, and it was a direct-to-camera (with three other cameras intercutting) discussion about the place we find ourselves in. Most of this was not new, repeating the same lines from past speeches including the one at Davos, while promising to never sugarcoat things—but he kind of did. I also have to question why this had to be over YouTube and not a speech in the House of Commons, which is why there is allotted time every day for ministers to make statements if they so choose. This could have been done there.

Carney pointed to a “statue” of Isaac Brock that Mike Myers gave him, but by statue he meant two-inch figurine, and that led him to launch into a whole War of 1812 narrative about the people who built this country, which, okay, sure, but you’re not doing much to show you’re not just the second coming of Stephen Harper. When he talked about the building of big things in the post-war period, this is again where things got a bit sugar-coated because there was still complexity to these old projects, and usually practices that would be unacceptable today for good reason. (I also noted that he mentioned universities being built in this period, without mention of the fact that provincial governments are in the process of dismantling our university systems). He also spoke about protecting social programmes (except for letting the funding of a bunch of groups who deliver services lapse), and he mentions pharmacare like it’s not limited to two types of drugs in a handful of provinces. And further sugar-coating was essentially by omission—the fact that so many Canadian businesses have become apathetic to growth or increasing productivity because they have taken the lesson that all they need to do is become rent-seekers.

Predictably, Pierre Poilievre decided he was going to have something to say about this, and that it was all just an illusion because nothing has actually been built yet (because you can build things overnight). He railed about Carney just enriching “well-connected elites,” but Poilievre’s whole scheme is to double down on trickle-down economics, which by definition enriches a small group of elites because the money does not, in fact, trickle down. Melissa Lantsman put out her own rebuttal that included the incredulous and false claim that the Liberals have cost the economy a trillion dollars in the past decade, which is completely fiscally illiterate, but that’s how the Conservatives roll.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-04-19T23:08:01.392Z

Ukraine Dispatch

There was a massive overnight attack Saturday on Chernihiv which killed a sixteen-year-old boy, and wounded others. Ukraine is continuing its own drone strikes on Russian oil facilities in Samara, occupied Crimea, and the Baltic Sea.

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Roundup: The benefit of the doubt for Gladu

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The Liberal convention is happening this weekend in Montreal, and it’s in part a way that prime minister Mark Carney is putting his stamp on the party now that he’s been leader for a year. It’s a different kind of convention—claimed to be the largest policy convention in the party’s history, and there are no American Democrats giving keynote speeches for the party faithful to fangirl over for a change—the keynote was Canadian Rick Hansen, which again, is a marked shift from years past.

Of course, so much of the oxygen is being taken up by the recent floor-crossers, Marilyn Gladu most especially, and while you have news stories talking about a “mixed reaction,” there is nevertheless a sense that pervades the quotes across news stories that delegates are Carney fans, and that they’re giving him the benefit of the doubt for welcoming them into the party, particularly if it gets them to a majority parliament that will being some stability. Chris d’Entremont and Matt Jeneroux have made comments of their own about feeling secure in their decisions, while progressive Liberals like Karina Gould and Stephen Guilbeault are couching their reservations about Gladu into an optimism that she knew what she was signing up for when she crossed over. For her part, Gladu is also talking about how she hopes this move will benefit her riding, though governments aren’t really supposed to favour only ridings they hold (even though it happens, especially provincially).

As for policy, it has been noticed that there isn’t much talk about Trump, even though he continues to dominate the political airwaves and is giving Carney much of his raison d’être for what he’s doing. There are policy resolutions on banning social media for minors, or limiting use of chatbots (but nobody seems to understand the massive problems associated with age verification).

Ukraine Dispatch

President Zelenskyy says that they are facing pressure both military as spring arrives, but also diplomatically as allies want them to stop hitting Russian oil and gas facilities as prices are so high. Farmers in Ukraine are now being hit by high fertilizer prices thanks to the Iran conflict.

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Roundup: Trying to deflect on forced labour

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There was a lot of talk about newly-minted Liberal MP Michael Ma’s performance at the industry committee, where he questioned a witness about whether she had personally witnessed forced labour in China, in a tactic to try and dismiss her in favour of a witness who was pro-trade in Chinese EVs. Ma later apologised, and there was apparently some confusion over just which region in China he was referring to, but still, it made for a poor clip from committee (and of the CBC reporter chasing him on the Hill), and bad clips would seem to be a cardinal sin in Parliament these days.

This being said, there would seem to me to be a tension in all of this that very few people want to actually discuss, which is the fact that Carney’s “strategic partnerships” that he’s been patting himself on the back for post-Davos speech involve countries that involve forced labour—China and Qatar—while at the same time praising all of the “good, union jobs” that those partnerships will create back home in Canada. This while the Liberals still insist that they opposed forced labour in all of its forms, and that they have strong rules about eliminated forced labour from supply chains. There is a fundamental disconnect that they seem incapable of bridging coherently, because they simply ignore the dissonance, or in Ma’s case, his attempt to throw confusion around it just wound up making him look like an ass.

This is why I wrote my column earlier in the week about the Canadian Ombud for Responsible Enterprise, whose office was designed to look for forced labour in supply chains and call it out, and the fact that Carney has left the office vacant for the past year and will almost certainly smother it in its sleep and scrap the office in the name of budget cuts—so that there is no embarrassment caused over these “strategic partnerships” with forced-labour countries in the name of being “pragmatic” in the post-rupture world of global trade. Ma just gave the government a black eye over this, so we’ll see if they can handle themselves any better in the face of these embarrassing contradictions.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia claims to have taken a village in eastern Ukraine, while Ukraine reclaimed a village in the Dnipropetrovsk region. President Zelenskyy arrived for an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia, one of the countries Ukraine is supplying drone expertise.

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