Prime Minister Mark Carney is acting more like the college freshmen who just cashed his first student loan cheque than the bean-counting banker who knows how to save money.

When he was campaigning to be the prime minister, Carney’s own platform acknowledged “the federal government has been spending too much.” Now that he is the prime minister, Carney is spending billions of dollars more than the last guy. 

Carney just released his main spending plan for the upcoming year and the numbers are bad for taxpayers.

Those Main Estimates show Carney is increasing spending to about $506 billion, which is $18 billion more than last year’s Main Estimates.

Carney’s new spending is layered on top of a pre-existing mountain of spending hikes.

The Main Estimates announced $258 billion in spending in 2017. Carney will spend 35 per cent more in 2026, even after adjusting for inflation and population growth.

Where is all the extra money going?

After the government doubled the debt in a decade, debt interest charges cost more than $1 billion every week. If interest charges were a department, it would be the third largest.

The federal government will spend more money on interest payments than it will spend through the department of National Defence in 2026, according to the Main Estimates. And that’s after Carney massively increased the defence department’s budget.

The government’s own numbers herald former Liberal finance minister Paul Martin’s warnings about the dangers of debt.

“The debt and deficit are not inventions of ideology, they are facts of arithmetic,” Martin said in his 1995 budget speech. “The quicksand of compound interest is real.”

Debt interest charges cost taxpayers $21 billion a decade ago. Today, the bill is more than double and it’s growing fast. By 2030, debt interest charges will cost $76 billion, chewing through 13 cents of every dollar the government takes.

Federal spending and debt exploded in lockstep with the growth in the bureaucracy. Despite daily headlines about cuts in Ottawa, the federal bureaucracy continues to cost more money.

The cost of the bureaucracy increased 80 per cent between 2015 and 2024. And the Main Estimates show Carney’s bureaucracy costs will increase by another five per cent in 2026-27.

Not only are taxpayers paying way more for in-house government bureaucrats, but they’re also paying way more for outside participation.

Ottawa doubled its spending on consultants, contractors and outsourcing between 2015 and 2024. Carney promised his government would “significantly reducing reliance on external consultants” during the election. Despite that promise, Carney is increasing the cost of consultants, contractors and outsourcing to nearly $27 billion in 2026.

Carney is also increasing subsidies to businesses through Ottawa’s seven regional development agencies. This corporate welfare will cost taxpayers $1.9 billion – a 26 per cent increase in one year.

Carney is also giving the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council an extra $80 million in 2026.

The $1 billion per year slush fund is supposed to fund research that provides “insights on the issues that matter most to Canadians.”

But it spent $105,000 “tracking the birth, life and death of an urban grocery cart.” It spent $20,000 studying “gender politics of Peruvian rock music,” $94,000 on a report about the “rhetoric of the selfie” and $24,500 trying to figure out how to advance gender equity and sustainable development through bicycles.

The government is hiking funding to other notorious waste offenders like the Governor General’s office and Parks Canada. Parliamentarians can’t even bother to find savings right under their noses. Both the House of Commons and the Senate will take more money from taxpayers in 2026.

Carney sold Canadians on the idea that as a former banker he would take better care of Canada’s finances.

That means Carney will need to learn how to put down the credit card because right now he’s borrowing billions more while debt interest spirals out of control.

This column was originally published in the Toronto Sun on March 13, 2026.