Why Mark Carney’s budget fails to address Canada’s economic crisis

You can tell a lot about a government by how it embraces a crisis. Canadians deserve leadership that seizes crises as opportunities, not policies that play it safe. Yet the Carney Liberals’ first budget demonstrates timidity instead of bold action. The most common approach is to ignore, explain away, or manage down. People don’t like big, scary challenges and will ignore impending doom as long as possible to avoid the discomfort of confronting, or even naming, a problem. For this reason, governments with a keen survival instinct manage down crises. Governments are aided, and even encouraged, in this by a public service that defaults to managing down threats and expectations, particularly when confronted with problems that are tough to fix. Playing it safe is the order of the day. B