Are Canadians going to get behind Mark Carney's 'generational' budget?

"Generational" is the Carney government's adjective of choice at this moment of consequence. The word appeared 11 times in the prepared text of François Philippe-Champagne's budget speech and another 45 times in the 493-page budget document.

It is a word apparently meant to speak to both the gravity of the country's situation and the bigness of this government response.

"This is not a time for small plans," Champagne writes in the budget's foreword.

The word also assumes some kind of lasting significance — both for this moment and for the government's response.

As much as one should be humble about predicting the future relevance of the present, it seems safe to assume that this moment will matter, even if we cannot know exactly how.

But the exact significance of this budget might depend on what happens over the next 12 months.

The first big number to be focused on will inevitably be the deficit — $78.3 billion in the current fiscal year, falling gradually to $56.6 billion four years from now. That deficit for 2025-26 is $36 billion higher than what Justin Trudeau's government projected last December — on the day Chrystia Freeland effectively brought the Trudeau era to an end — and $16 billion higher than what Mark Carney's Liberals projected during this spring's federal election.

But it's also still relatively modest when compared with previous moments of national crisis. As a share of GDP — the deficit in relation to the size of the national economy — it's projected to peak at 2.5 per cent. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the deficit was 14.8 per cent of GDP. During the Great Recession, Stephen Harper's Conservative government ran a deficit equal to 3.6 per cent of GDP. (During the Second World War, the deficit reached 22.5 per cent of GDP.)

Given that some projections suggested the deficit could reach $90 billion, the actual deficit might seem less dramatic. But, as always, the size of a deficit matters less than how it is used.

The single biggest item line over the five-year plan is an $56.6-billion investment in the Canadian Armed Forces. The second-biggest expense is actually the income-tax cut that the government passed in June ($27.2 billion).

A little over $20 billion is put toward a "generational" investment in infrastructure. $1.5 billion will go toward tax measures meant to boost business investment. $12 billion is set aside for protecting and reorienting strategic industrial sectors and $4.4 billion will be put toward expanding trade. $7 billion is committed toward a new Crown agency — Build Canada Homes — that will focus on affordable housing.

Aside these expenditures is a significant set of cuts — the budget touts $60 billion in "savings" over five years.

Some of these cuts are at least broadly acknowledged — "recalibrated international assistance" will save $2.7 billion over four years. But much of the reductions in departmental budgets are shrouded in euphemisms like "modernizing government operations," "streamlining program delivery" and "recalibrating government programs."

Perhaps some of that modernizing, streamlining and recalibrating will be relatively easy. But no doubt some of it will draw loud complaints in the months ahead as the actual implications become clear (interestingly, the word "sacrifice" appears in neither the budget nor Champagne's speech).