Business
Canadians can’t afford another Ottawa budget failure
This article supplied by Troy Media.
A $92 billion budget deficit looms. Canadians need more than promises this time
As Ottawa prepares its fall budget, Canadians should demand a clean break from the status quo. After a decade of unrestrained deficit spending, we are fiscally adrift: burdened by costly new programs and a bloated bureaucracy, and with little to show for it.
That’s why the Carney government must do more than tinker and finally deliver the kind of budget Canadians haven’t seen in years.
The previous Liberal government left office with a national debt nearing $1.4 trillion, having failed to balance the budget in its nine years in power. A growing share of tax dollars is now going just to service that debt.
While the government has pledged to reduce program spending by 15 per cent in the 2028-29 fiscal year through shrinking departments and cutting waste (after smaller reductions the previous two years), it is still on track to post a sizeable deficit of $92 billion for 2025-26, according to projections published by the C.D. Howe Institute. That should be a warning sign. Ottawa cannot rely on vague promises of restraint years down the road—it needs to act now.
Here is what the Carney government must do to get its finances in order:
1. It needs to roll back costly programs and reduce the size of government.
Under Justin Trudeau, the federal bureaucracy grew by nearly 100,000 people, a 38 per cent increase. Yet despite a considerable hike in personnel costs, Canadians would be hard pressed to point to noticeable improvements in service delivery.
Real reform would look like the Chrétien model from the 1990s. Faced with persistent deficits, the Chrétien government acted decisively, cutting over 42,000 public sector jobs. A comparable 17.4 per cent reduction today could eliminate 64,000 jobs and save almost $10 billion annually.
The review should also cover new programs that depend on deficit spending and often overlap with provincial responsibilities.
For example, the federal dental plan is projected to cost taxpayers $13 billion over five years, while the proposed pharmacare plan will cost $13.4 billion per year by 2027-28. Rolling back such initiatives could yield substantial savings.
2. The government must remove excessive regulation that is strangling Canadian business.
Between 2006 and 2021, federal regulations increased by 37 per cent, reaching 320,000 in total. Statistics Canada estimates that this reduced real GDP growth by 1.7 percentage points, employment growth by 1.3 percentage points, and labour productivity growth by 0.4 percentage points over the same time period. Those numbers may seem abstract, but the effect is concrete: less growth, fewer jobs, lower productivity.
Canadian businesses spend about 768 million hours a year on compliance—the equivalent of 394,000 full-time jobs. In 2024 alone, red tape cost businesses nearly $51.5 billion—a hidden tax on productivity.
Is anyone surprised that entrepreneurship in Canada is on the decline? In the year 2000, three out of every 1,000 Canadians had started a business. By 2022, that rate had fallen to just 1.3 per 1,000, representing a nearly 57 per cent drop.
Had Ottawa maintained 2006 regulation levels, Canada would have seen a 10 per cent higher rate of new businesses entering the market in 2021.
3. The Carney government must scrap harmful policies that undermine our energy sector.
Regulations aimed squarely at Canada’s oil and gas sector are setting the country up for a rude awakening.
Take Ottawa’s oil and gas emissions cap, set to take effect next year. It aims to reduce emissions from this sector to 35 per cent below 2019 levels, but reports from Deloitte and the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) confirm that it is effectively a production cap.
Oil and gas accounts for 3.3 per cent of national GDP in 2024, but the emissions cap would change that. Deloitte estimates that by 2040, this regulation would lower Canada’s GDP by one per cent, representing a $34.5-billion loss in constant 2017 dollars.
The cap would also cost 112,900 Canadian jobs by 2040. The numbers all point in the same direction: the policy is an economic self-inflicted wound.
Similarly, the PBO projects that to meet Ottawa’s emissions goal, oil and gas production would need to be 4.9 per cent lower than current forecasts over 2030-32.
For a country with the world’s fourth-largest natural gas reserves and as the third-largest exporter, such policies are reckless. This fall, Canadians should not be presented with a budget that doubles down on the same policies that have already strangled business creation, driven away investment and suppressed living standards.
Canadians are long overdue for something we haven’t seen in years—a responsible budget.
Samantha Dagres is Communications Manager at the Montreal Economic Institute, an independent think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary.
Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country
Business
Warning Canada: China’s Economic Miracle Was Built on Mass Displacement
If you think the CCP will treat foreigners better than its own people, when it extends its power over you, please think again: Dimon Liu’s warning to Canadian Parliament.
Editor’s Note: The Bureau is publishing the following testimony to Canada’s House of Commons committee on International Human Rights from Dimon Liu, a China-born, Washington, D.C.-based democracy advocate who testified in Parliament on December 8, 2025, about the human cost of China’s economic rise. Submitted to The Bureau as an op-ed, Liu’s testimony argues that the Canadian government should tighten scrutiny of high-risk trade and investment, and ensure Canada’s foreign policy does not inadvertently reward coercion. Liu also warns that the Chinese Communist Party could gain leverage over Canadians and treat them as it has done to its own subjugated population—an implied message to Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has pledged to engage China as a strategic partner without making that position clear to Canadians during his election campaign.
OTTAWA — It is an honor to speak before you at the Canadian Parliament.
My testimony will attempt to explain why China’s economic success is built on the backs of the largest number of displaced persons in human history.
It is estimated that these displaced individuals range between 300 to 400 million — it is equivalent to the total population of the United States being uprooted and forced to relocate. These displaced persons are invisible to the world, their sufferings unnoticed, their plights ignored.
In 1978, when economic reform began, China’s GDP was $150 billion USD.
In 2000, when China joined the WTO, it was approximately $1.2 trillion USD.
China’s current GDP is approximately $18 trillion USD.
In 2000 China’s manufacturing output was smaller than Italy’s.
Today it’s larger than America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea combined.
If you have ever wondered how China managed to grow so fast in such a short time, Charles Li, former CEO of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, has the answers for you.
He listed 4 reasons: 1) cheapest land, 2) cheapest labor, 3) cheapest capital, and 4) disregard of environmental costs.
“The cheapest land” because the CCP government took the land from the farmers at little to no compensation.
“The cheapest labor,” because these farmers, without land to farm, were forced to find work in urban areas at very low wages.
The communist household registration system (hukou 戶口) ties them perpetually to the rural areas. This means they are not legal residents, and cannot receive social benefits that legal urban residents are entitled. They could be evicted at any time.
One well known incident of eviction occurred in November 2017. Cai Qi, now the second most powerful man in China after Xi Jinping, was a municipal official in Beijing. He evicted tens of thousands into Beijing’s harsh winter, with only days, or just moments of notice. Cai Qi made famous a term, “low-end population” (低端人口), and exposed CCP’s contempt of rural migrants it treats as second class citizens.
These displaced migrant workers have one tradition they hold dear — it is to reunite with their families during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday, making this seasonal migration of 100 to 150 million people a spectacular event. In China’s economic winter of 2025 with waves of bankruptcies and factory closures, the tide of unemployed migrant workers returning home to where there is also no work, and no land to farm, has become a worrisome event.
Historically in the last 2,000 years, social instability has caused the collapse of many ruling regimes in China.
“The cheapest capital” is acquired through predatory banking practices, and through the stock markets, first to rake in the savings of the Chinese people; and later international investments by listing opaque, and state owned enterprises in leading stock markets around the world.
“A disregard of environmental costs” is a hallmark of China’s industrialization. The land is poisoned, so is the water; and China produces one-third of all global greenhouse gases.
Chinese Communist officials often laud their system as superior. The essayist Qin Hui has written that the Chinese communist government enjoys a human rights abuse advantage. This is true. By abusing its own people so brutally, the CCP regime has created an image of success, which will prove to be a mirage.
If you think the CCP will treat foreigners better than its own people, when it extends its power over you, please think again.
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Business
Judge Declares Mistrial in Landmark New York PRC Foreign-Agent Case
U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan declared a mistrial Monday afternoon in the high-profile foreign-agent and corruption case against former New York state official Linda Sun and her husband Chris Hu, after jurors reported they were hopelessly deadlocked on all 19 counts.
After restarting deliberations Monday morning with an alternate juror, the panel sent a note to Judge Cogan stating:
“Your honor, after extensive deliberations and redeliberations the jury remains unable to reach a unanimous verdict. The jurors’ positions are firmly held.”
Cogan brought the jury into court and asked the foreman whether they had reached agreement on any counts. They replied that they were deadlocked on every one. The judge then declared a mistrial.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Solomon immediately told the court that the government intends to retry the case “as soon as possible.” A status conference is scheduled for January 26, 2026, to determine next steps.
Jury selection began November 10, 2025, and the government called 41 witnesses to the stand, compared with eight for the defense and one rebuttal witness for the prosecution. Deliberations began on December 12, and by this afternoon the jurors had sent three notes to the court — each indicating deadlock.
As The Bureau reported in its exclusive analysis Friday, the panel’s fracture had become visible as jurors headed into a second week of deliberations in a landmark foreign-agent and corruption trial that reached into two governors’ offices — a case asking a jury of New Yorkers to decide whether Sun secretly served Beijing’s interests while she and Hu built a small business and luxury-property empire during the pandemic, cashing in on emergency procurement as other Americans were locked down.
Prosecutors urged jurors to accept their account of a dense web of family and Chinese-community financial transactions through which Sun and Hu allegedly secured many millions of dollars in business deals tied to “United Front” proxies aligned with Beijing. The defense, by contrast, argued that Sun and Hu were simply successful through legitimate, culturally familiar transactions, not any covert scheme directed by a foreign state.
Sun and Hu face 19 charges in total, including allegations that Sun acted as an unregistered foreign agent for the People’s Republic of China; visa-fraud and alien-smuggling counts tied to a 2019 Henan provincial delegation; a multimillion-dollar pandemic PPE kickback scheme; bank-fraud and identity-misuse allegations; and multiple money-laundering and tax-evasion counts.
Prosecutors have argued that the clearest money trail ran through New York’s COVID procurement scramble and a pair of Jiangsu-linked emails. In closing, Solomon told jurors that Sun’s “reward” for steering contracts was “millions of dollars in kickbacks or bribes,” contending the money was routed through accounts opened in Sun’s mother’s name and via friends and relatives.
The government has tied those claims to a broader narrative — laid out in Solomon’s summation and dissected in The Bureau’s reporting — that Sun functioned as a “trusted insider” who repurposed state access and letterhead to advance Beijing’s priorities, including by allegedly forging Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature on invitation letters used for Chinese provincial delegations, while keeping those relationships hidden from colleagues. The defense, in turn, urged jurors to reject the government’s picture of clandestine agency and argued prosecutors had overreached by treating ordinary diaspora networking, trade promotion, and pandemic procurement as criminal conduct — insisting none of the evidence proved the “direction or control” element central to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Whether a future jury will see the same evidence as corruption and covert foreign agency or as culturally familiar commerce and politics — will now be tested again, on a new timetable, in a courtroom that has already shown just how difficult this record is to unanimously interpret.
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