Taxpayers have a simple benchmark for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first budget: Spending must go down.

After a decade of out-of-control spending, Carney’s budget will be a failure if he spends one dollar more than former prime minister Justin Trudeau.

There’s plenty of waste to cut in Ottawa.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council takes more than $1 billion from taxpayers every year.

It spent $20,000 studying the gender politics of Peruvian rock music, $105,000 “tracking the birth, life and death” of a grocery cart and $50,000 studying the “affective experience of sexual and erotic video games.”

Carney needs to rein in Ottawa’s worst waste offender: Global Affairs Canada.

Global Affairs bureaucrats bill taxpayers $51,000 per month on booze. The department spent $8,800 on a sex toy show in Germany and $12,520 so seniors in other countries could talk about their sex lives in front of live audiences.

That waste is just the tip of the iceberg.

Parks Canada wasted four years and $10,000 capturing a single bullfrog and dropped $800,000 hunting 84 deer. How can a simple hunt cost $10,000 per deer?

The National Capital Commission spent $8 million building a barn on the governor general’s estate. Departments and agencies waste millions producing government podcasts no one listens to. The Governor General spent $71,000 on limo services in Iceland and $100,000 on airplane food during a week-long trip to the Middle East.

Carney must remove failing Crown corporations from the taxpayer credit card.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation uses the $1 billion it takes from taxpayers every year to beef up its bureaucracy. CBC has 250 directors, 450 managers, 780 producers, 130 advisors, 81 analysts, 80 project leads, 30 lead architects, 25 supervisors, among other bureaucrats, that are paid more than $100,000 per year.

Canada Post took a $1-billion bailout from taxpayers this year after losing $3.8 billion over the last seven years. The government bailed out VIA Rail to the tune of $1.9 billion over the last five years just to cover the train company’s operating losses.

Carney must also tackle the big waste, like the bureaucracy and corporate welfare.

The government added 99,000 federal paper pushers and ballooned the cost of the bureaucracy 77 per cent since 2016. Despite that out-of-control bureaucrat hiring spree, half of Canadians say federal services have gotten worse since 2016. Taxpayers would save $7 billion annually had the bureaucracy grown in line with Canada’s population over the decade.

Federal corporate subsidies totalled $11.2 billion in 2022 alone. That means federal corporate welfare costs a Canadian family of four more than $1,100 in one year.

The government has been wasting money for years.

The government spent all-time highs before the pandemic, in 2018, even after accounting for inflation and population growth. The government then used the cloud of COVID to go on a debt-fueled spending spree, with 35 per cent of all new announced spending having nothing to do with the pandemic.

But here’s the biggest waste of money the government forces taxpayers to pay: Interest charges on the debt.

Debt interest charges cost taxpayers more than $1 billion every week. The government wasted more money paying interest on the debt than it sent to the provinces in health transfers last year. In fact, every dollar Canadians paid in federal sales taxes went to pay interest on the debt.

Trudeau spent $539.5 billion last year. After a decade of out-of-control spending, if Carney spends even one dollar more than Trudeau, taxpayers will give Budget 2025 a big-fat F.

This column was first published in the Toronto Sun.