Heather Wright/The Independent

Marilyn Gladu is giving Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first budget a D.

The MP for Sarnia-Lambton-Bkejwanong says it does little to help students and seniors and continues the high government spending which she says drives up inflation.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne unveiled the first budget since April 2024 and some of the numbers are eye-popping. 

The federal government projects a $78 billion deficit this fiscal year. It’s anticipated to drop to $65 billion and dip to $57 billion in 2029-30. That’s far higher than the $42 billion the Trudeau Liberal government projected.

Champagne said the economy suffered as the US president slapped tariffs on some of the country’s largest industries. That slowed economic growth and led to layoffs.

The budget promises $141 million in new spending. There are promises of big money for defense, money for critical mineral projects, infrastructure money for municipalities and tax cuts for companies investing in capital including for LNG projects. 

The feds plan to cut “operational spending” by shrinking the civil service by about 40,000 jobs.

Gladu spoke to The Independent about the budget and its massive deficit as the Finance Minister was delivering the budget to MPs in the House of Commons.

“It’s $78 billion and we know that this kind of spending just pours fuel on the inflationary fire, and it’ll drive the cost of everything up,” Gladu said. 

“I think at a time when Canadians are struggling with affordability that’s not what we need.”

“There’s nothing for seniors in this budget. I was disappointed about that because, you know, 25 per cent of seniors are living below the poverty line,” the MP said. 

“We’ve got 15 per cent unemployment amongst the youth, and really there’s some training that’s in this new budget, but not really a lot to address the opportunities that youth need there now,” she added. Gladu says the federal government should be investing in more training programs, particularly in the trades.

“We’re missing 100,000 trade jobs in Ontario and we want to build all these houses and different facilities and so we are going to need to have more incentives for example, an apprenticeship program.”

And she believes high levels of immigration are limiting the number of jobs available to youth. 

“The government has really not started to act on temporary foreign workers that are taking up 25 per cent of, for example, the fast food industry jobs. These are the jobs where youth first get in the workplace, and so they need to get those kind of experiences.”

The Carney budget does propose to reduce immigration target for temporary residents from over 673,000 in 2025 to 385,000 in 2026. The number of permanent resident admissions would be 380,000 in 2026, down 15,000 from this year.

Gladu is quick to point out those programs are not helpful if the government does little to remove people who are not supposed to be in Canada anymore. “There’s five million people that are supposed to leave the country in December because they’re on expired permits of all kinds, and they have no plan to make sure those folks are gone.”

The MP also suggested the feds should be encouraging LNG production, suggesting tax incentives announced Tuesday were existing programs.

Gladu was positive about $50 billion fund for local infrastructure, something she says Sarnia-Lambton should investigate. She also praised the $600 million spent on women’s issues over five years. 

Gladu give the budget a D grade and her party agrees.“I think the likelihood of us supporting this budget is probably at zero,” she said.

Budgets are confidence motions and can trigger elections. That’s not something Gladu anticipates. “The NDP have indicated or signalled that they might have some of their members abstain, because clearly they have no leader and they don’t have enough money to run an election.”