Imagine a diet where you only count calories at lunch and dinner. The weekend brunch, the post-work beers and the midnight tub of ice-cream don’t count. And when you do track your fries, you label them as vegetables.

That’s a pretty soft diet. 

Now imagine you don’t even stick to that diet and still expect to lose weight.

That’s what’s happening with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s budgeting. 

Carney promised to “balance the operating budget by Budget 2028” during the election. 

Here’s what that means in plain language: 

Carney split the federal budget into two piles: Day-to-day operating spending and capital spending. Then he promised to balance just one of them.

That plan was always more of a distraction than a solution to fix Canada’s finances. Politicians hope that if they can repeat a phrase that sounds like balancing the budget, maybe Canadians won’t notice the debt grow tens of billions of dollars every year. 

Carney is borrowing $65 billion this year and even plans to add billions more to the debt than what former prime minister Justin Trudeau planned. 

Trudeau planned to borrow another $154 billion through 2029. Carney plans to borrow $310 billion over those same years. That’s twice as much as his big-spending predecessor.

Here’s the problem with only balancing half the budget: Taxpayers pay interest on every dollar the government borrows.

Debt interest charges cost taxpayers more than $1 billion every week. That means the equivalent of a brand-new hospital isn’t built every week because that $1 billion is going to the bond fund managers on Bay Street instead.

Debt interest costs each Canadian about $1,400 this year. That’s money taken out of your budget and wasted paying the government’s debt interest instead of fixing roads or cutting taxes.

Carney’s promise to balance the operating budget is a soft target. And he’s on track to miss that target.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer says “the government would not achieve its fiscal anchor of balancing operating spending with revenues by 2028-29.”

Carney isn’t sticking to his budget diet even though he’s counting fries as vegetables. 

Carney’s government counts “corporate income tax expenditures, investment tax credits and operating (production) subsidies” as capital, the PBO said. The PBO also notes that “federal spending on these measures would not be considered capital formation” under international standards used in the United Kingdom. The provinces wouldn’t count it as capital, either.

And this isn’t the first time the PBO caught the Carney government snacking on chips. 

Following last year’s budget, the PBO caught the government relabelling $94 billion of operating spending as capital.

Carney promised to “spend less, so Canada can invest more.” The government announced $173 billion in new measures since Budget 2025. Three quarters of that, or $127 billion, is day-to-day operating spending, according to the PBO. 

“The deterioration in the fiscal track therefore reflects the government’s own policy choices, concentrated in operating rather than capital spending,” the PBO said.

You don’t lose weight by relabelling your fries and pretending weekend calories don’t count.

And you don’t fix the nation’s finances by relabelling spending and looking the other way while the debt soars. 

Carney needs to focus less on changing spending labels and focus more on spending less. 

This column was originally published in the Toronto Sun on Oct. 4, 2026.