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I was standing in the Cathédrale Saint-Vincent in St. Malo, France, with my 82-year-old French mother and sister on the day the federal government’s spring economic update was released. The plaque over the tomb of Jacques Cartier there, in translation, reads: “Here rests Jacques Cartier, native of Saint-Malo and the first discoverer of Canada, who died in 1557.”

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It was a moving moment. Cartier was an explorer who took genuine risk, with no certainty of return, to chart a new world. Canada’s origin story is one of risk-taking, exploration and the courage to build something that did not yet exist.

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That night, I read the update. The contrast was difficult to ignore.

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Mark Carney was elected on a promise of economic seriousness: the central banker who could face down Donald Trump and replace ideology with competence. The ridiculous Elbows Up branding worked. Like the classic Pied Piper story, many Canadians followed the tune.

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The update does not vindicate the marketing.

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The headline number is a projected 2025-26 deficit of $66.9 billion, better than the $78.3 billion forecast in November’s budget, but only because of windfall revenues. The update brags that this is the result of prudent fiscal management. It is not. A $66.9-billion deficit is history-making by any measure.

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Worse, the update leans heavily on the deceptive accounting trick: the artificial split between capital and operating budgets. Under this framing, the government will “balance operating spending with revenues by 2028-29,” never mind that it will still run deficits of $53 billion to $63 billion every year through 2030-31.

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Bondholders do not care which bucket Ottawa assigns the spending to. A deficit is a deficit. This is the kind of presentation that only fools the financially illiterate.

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The boast about the ratio of debt to gross domestic product (GDP) is similar. The update trumpets Canada’s “10.2 per cent net debt-to-GDP ratio” against the G7 average of 101.8 per cent. That figure nets Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Quebec Pension Plan assets against federal debt, but those assets are not available to the government and so this statistic is misleading to measure federal fiscal capacity.

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Meanwhile, public debt charges will rise to $80.9 billion by 2030-31 from $54 billion this year. Federal health transfers to the provinces will be $57.4 billion next year, rising to $67.5 billion by 2030-31. Within five years, we will be spending more on servicing the debt than we transfer to the provinces for health care. This is fiscally irresponsible.

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The tax measures are light, with the highlight being that the $10-million capital gains exemption for employee ownership trusts (EOT) will now be permanent. Proposed in 2023, the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated this would cost the government $23 million over four years — a pittance. The update estimated the cost to be $205 million over six years. I don’t believe it.