Conrad Black: Budget 2024 Is an Assault on Canadian Investment

Commentary Chrystia Freeland’s recent budget was another assault on investment in Canada, which is the chief engine of economic growth and therefore of per capita income and wealth of Canadians. The budget projected a deficit of $40 billion in 2024–25, followed in the succeeding year by a dramatic reduction to $39.8 billion, and similar tokenistic reductions in the succeeding two years. This is from the government whose opening gambit on the subject of deficits was that they cure themselves, as if the level of federal spending and the ambience for investors could be presumed to rise to absorb any deficit, and the federal government had a blank cheque to chase the votes it wished with the targeted incentives it chose to make, no matter where the arithmetic led....