Jackson says budget is opposite of what Carney promised
Federal Budget
November 10, 2025, 1:19 pm
Nicole Taylor, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The federal government released its budget on Tuesday.
The World-Spectator spoke with Brandon-Souris MP Grant Jackson about his take on the budget:
What is your overall take on this budget?
I have a few thoughts, but the first one that comes to mind is this is the exact opposite of what Mark Carney campaigned on. This is the exact opposite of what he promised Canadians. He said he was the big fiscal manager who was going to come in and bring stability to a federal government that was out of control in its spending habits, and instead of doing that he doubled the size of the deficit. It’s $78 billion in this budget, which is like an astronomical figure. Outside of Covid I don’t even know when the last year or when it ever would have been this high.
It’s the complete opposite of what he promised to Canadians, so that’s a huge disappointment for me and I think for everybody who is just trying to pay their grocery bills and make their mortgage payments.
It’s really a staggering number. Just to break that down, this deficit, if it holds to the projections in the budget, over the next five years it will add $321.7 billion to the federal debt. That’s twice the $154 billion that Trudeau added. It’s a staggering amount of money.
Is there anything else you are critical of in this budget?
I try to relate this to what I hear at the doors and honestly the vast majority of people I hear at the doors are number one about Trump, but of course you aren’t going to deal with Trump in a budget, and the next thing I hear about is healthcare. Healthcare is a disaster in the country, and now if this debt is projected, which I’m sure they are going to spend the money.
So let’s be clear, I’m not casting doubt on that, so when this deficit turns into debt, which it will by the end of the fiscal year, we will now pay more on debt interest payments than we will in transfers to provincial governments to deliver universal healthcare. That’s a disaster. Like that is really bad, people want to know why the long wait times and bad outcomes in healthcare. We can’t find staff, we are not keeping up with the pace of demand and now we’re paying more in interest payments to bankers who have loaned us money as a country than we are in delivering universal healthcare that Canadians pay for in their taxes.
That’s the biggest eye opener for me. It is really concerning.
Is there anything that you see as positives in this budget?
We support the investment to our Canadian Armed Forces for sure. I think they are tinkering around the edges of the problem with the corporate tax cuts in the budget, but any tax cut is a good tax cut as far as we are concerned.
There’s a few good things, and back to the CAF, I’ve been to CFB Shilo a couple of times since the wage increases came into effect, and it is important for those members. They put their lives on the line for this country, they’re over in Latvia dealing with the Russians and everything else that is going on over there. These people earn the paycheque that they deserve to get paid. I think we support that in terms of investment in the CAF.
The biggest concern we see is they’re talking about getting to now 3.5 percent of GDP on defense, and then the anomaly of getting to 5 per cent at some point in the future, but there is nothing in the budget that actually says what they’re going to spend that money on. They don’t talk about buying submarines because the four we have hardly float and they’re not talking about the purchase of the F-35. So they are talking about spending the money, but they’re not telling Canadians what they are going to spend it on.
That’s the big thing, we want the Liberals to actually make a commitment spend the money on something that helps our troops deliver what they are supposed to deliver on for Canadians. We didn’t see that, but globally we are glad that they have allocated the money with respect to national defense.
Let’s see if they can actually spend it because we know procurement is badly broken in this country, particularly defense procurement, but I think procurement overall. We will see whether they can spend it all on stuff they’ve allocated for it, but we are pleased that they are finally investing in our troops that are in uniform.
Is there anything else that you are happy about?
The tax cuts—any tax cut is a good tax cut. We think they could have gone farther but we will take what we can get. I think that is fair to say but there is a lot of concern with the budget. I wish I had more positive to say because being in opposition we get tired of being negative all the time, but it’s unfortunately our job to oppose when we see reason to oppose and gosh this budget has given us lots of examples.”
If the Conservatives had tabled a budget, what would you have done differently?
As the leader came out and said, we are midway through the fiscal year, so we weren’t even asking for it to be a balanced budget. We know that six months of it is already spent, so we were just asking him to hold it to the $42-odd-billion that was committed. So you would have seen that in a budget from us and I think you would have seen much more drastic moves into reigning in not just federal government spending, but also the size of the civil service.
They talk about reductions, but in five years from now they think through attrition, they might reduce the size of the civil service by 10 per cent, but they have doubled the size of the civil service in the last five years. So that is not really a very strong move to rebalance the size of the civil service and federal government staff compared to the size of the population.
We think they could have done a much better job, so you would have seen that in a budget from us.
What in this budget will have the most effect on your constituents and in your constituency?
Westman wasn’t even mentioned in the budget and I think Manitoba as a province was mentioned only once, and that was in the Arctic security section where they say they are going to build an all-weather road to Churchill. If you’ve ever been to northern Manitoba, it will be really difficult to do that. So I don’t know where that came from out of the blue.
That’s the only time that Manitoba was mentioned as a province. So if people from Westman are looking for specific things, I’m not sure they are going to find that in this budget.
But globally, agriculture, agri food, the oil and gas sector, we didn’t see a lot to try to revive those industries that have been suppressed for the last 10 years, and I think Canadians were hoping that Mark Carney was a guy that understood how this country makes money, and it’s on our natural resources, and it’s in the agriculture sector. I think they thought he was the guy that knew the numbers and was going to deliver something for those industries. We didn’t see that in the budget, and so that’s going to keep affecting people locally because it’s suppressing their wages, there’s less opportunity, and that’s a problem for our region and for the country.
I wish I had more positive to say but unfortunately this is not at all what the Liberal government under Mark Carney was elected to deliver.
