OTTAWA — The federal government may have spent upwards of $40 billion beyond what it laid out in its spring economic statement and needs to be more transparent about its books, according to a recent report by Desjardins deputy chief economist Randall Bartlett.
In a post earlier this month, Bartlett dives into the spending announcements the federal government has made since its April 28 spring fiscal update, and whether the funding source for those announcements has already been earmarked.
“Sticker shock aside, it’s unclear from many of the announcements how much of the spending was already approved by Parliament and how much of it is new money,” Barlett wrote. “Timelines are also often vague, as is the cost sharing between the federal government, Crown agencies, other levels of government and the private sector.
“All this raises reasonable concerns regarding the transparency of federal spending commitments,” Bartlett added. “Indeed, Canadians likely won’t know until the fall budget what these recent announcements mean for the Government of Canada’s bottom line.”
Bartlett specifically points to the Liberals’ announcements for a national AI strategy, national food security strategy, West Coast oil pipeline project, and the Canada-British Columbia Cooperative Prosperity Agreement as potentially costing the federal government anywhere between $35.2 billion and $43.7 billion in total, without any clearly outlined source of funding.
Those four announcements are from a larger list of spending commitments that Desjardins cites as being made since the spring economic update. The other items, however, Bartlett states “likely” fall under previously announced funding, including military support for Ukraine, the national electricity strategy, and other infrastructure- and defence-spending announcements.
Bartlett in his report also outlined the larger implications for Canada’s economy if those four spending announcements were not accounted for in the spring economic update.
“Assuming these are not funded out of already available resources and we’re correct that the other announcements after April 2026 are to be paid for out of previously approved envelopes, the federal debt-to-GDP ratio could rise faster and to a higher level than projected in the (spring economic update),” Barlett wrote.
“By 2035, the federal debt-to-GDP ratio may be nearly a full percentage point higher than published back in the spring,” he added.
In its first-ever spring economic update in April, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s then-newly minted majority government laid out $37.5 billion in net new spending. That number grows to $54.5 billion when including measures announced since the last federal budget, CTV News reported at the time.
The 167-page spring economic update stated that while the federal deficit is $11.4 billion lower in the last fiscal year than what was projected in the 2025 federal budget, the deficit is tracking to only decline nominally in the years ahead.
For example, in the current 2026-27 fiscal year, the deficit is projected to be $65.3 billion, down just slightly from the $65.4 billion estimated in the 2025 federal budget.
The Spring Economic Update 2026 Implementation Act received Royal Assent before the House of Commons and Senate rose for the summer in June.
During the federal election campaign last year, meanwhile, Carney pledged to rein in spending and separate the government’s operating budget from capital spending, and said he would “balance the operating budget over the next three years by cutting waste, by eliminating duplication and by deploying technology.”
In an email to CTV News on Wednesday, Champagne’s press secretary John Fragos said the government has acted with “great transparency,” including in its adoption of a “new budgeting reporting system” separating operational and capital spending.
“Despite reporting to the contrary, the government through Budget 2025 and Spring Economic Update 2026 has provided detailed line by line spending analysis, reporting not only what the government has spent to support Canadians and sectors through this turbulent global economic environment, but likewise what the government has booked to spend in the years to come,” Fragos wrote.
He added that in the face of global challenges and uncertainty, Canada is “moving at pace and with urgency,” requiring new spending commitments and announcements between tabling its spring update and its budget in the fall.
Bartlett’s concerns and those of other economists about a lack of transparency by the federal government were first reported on by the National Post.
Citing the National Post reporting in a statement Tuesday, Conservative finance critic Michael Chong called Carney’s increased deficits and debt “generationally unfair” to younger Canadians, and pointed to the current prime minister’s ballooned deficit compared to that of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.
“Conservatives call on Mr. Carney to respect the public purse and be transparent with federal finances — as previous governments have,” Chong wrote. “Mr. Carney needs to provide Parliament, including the Parliamentary Budget Officer, details on all his unbudgeted spending.”
With files from CTV News’ Rachel Aiello and Mike Le Couteur
