Is Mark Carney's budget a Progressive Conservative budget?

Attempting perhaps to turn a story about his own leadership into a story about whether the Canadian news media have unfairly focused on dissent within the Conservative caucus, Pierre Poilievre challenged reporters on Wednesday to pay as much attention to the recent criticism levelled against the federal government's budget by Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith.

Of course, that Erskine-Smith might deviate from the Liberal government's official line is hardly surprising at this point. The left-leaning Liberal backbencher has spent much of the past decade displaying a willingness to go his own way, so much so that many members of the parliamentary press gallery probably no longer consider it newsworthy when he does.

Whatever his quibbles and criticisms, Erskine-Smith also still supports the government and the budget.

But for the sake of assessing last week's budget, Erskine-Smith's critique offers a potentially useful starting point.

"I joked with colleagues that it’s a pretty good Progressive Conservative budget. A joke! But hey, some conservatives agree," Erskine-Smith concluded, linking to a video of former Conservative MP Chris d'Entremont walking into the Liberal caucus room after crossing the floor.

Jokingly or not, that isn't the first time someone has suggested Prime Minister Mark Carney is something of a progressive conservative. But if this is a Progressive Conservative budget, it would be — unofficially — the first such budget tabled in Parliament since 1993 — the last budget of Brian Mulroney's government and the last budget before the PC Party was shattered in that year's federal election.

That party — its dichotomous name the result of a marriage in 1942 between the Conservative Party of Canada and the leader of Manitoba's Progressive Party — limped along for another decade before being subsumed into the modern Conservative Party that Poilievre now leads.

As Poilievre has made clear, it's not the budget he would have tabled. But Carney might be content with the impression that it's also not the budget that Justin Trudeau would have tabled.

The federal budget tosses aside the Trudeau-era luxury tax on yachts and private planes, halts the former prime minister's signature promise to plant two billion trees (Carney will suffice with one billion) and holds out the possibility that the cap on greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector will be abandoned.

While the Trudeau Liberals always seemed lukewarm on liquefied natural gas, the Carney government has embraced it, and the budget restores a tax credit for the LNG development that had expired in 2024.

The 2025 budget also cements a number of previously announced changes: the repeal of the consumer carbon tax, the reversal of changes to capital-gains taxes and the end of the digital services tax.

In previous budgets, the Trudeau government committed to cut spending in certain areas by $15.8 billion over five years and eliminate 5,000 positions in the federal public service. The first Carney budget aims to shrink the size of the public service by 40,000 and find $44 billion in spending cuts over four years.

Beyond such particulars, a simple word count shows at least a change in emphasis. Carney promised a renewed focus on economic fundamentals, and his government's first budget makes 131 references to "productivity" — twice as many as the last Trudeau budget.

At the same time, this budget was not a wholesale repudiation of the Trudeau era.