Since taking power, Prime Minister Mark Carney has authorized more than $70 billion in spending without parliamentary approval, by using "special warrants" normally reserved for emergencies.
Carney is already steamrolling basic constraints on power | National Post | Tristin Hopper:
May 16, 2025 - "Only two months into the job, Prime Minister Mark Carney is already steamrolling through the usual checks by which a Canadian government is supposed to spend and manage taxpayer money. During the federal election, Carney greenlit a record $70 billion without Parliamentary approval. And now, even before the House of Commons has reconvened, his government has signalled its intentions not to publish a budget. With both actions, the new Liberal government has neutered one of the reasons Canada has a Parliament in the first place: To review and manage the disbursement of money....
Mark Carney at World Economic Forum, Davos, 2010.
"During his brief tenure, Carney has already used his executive authority to request two disbursements of money outside the federal government’s usual spending channels. On April 1, Carney was granted an order-in-council releasing $40.3 billion in emergency funds. The second, granted on May 2, was for $33.1 billion.
"The orders alone are not unprecedented: There’s long been a provision for the Governor General to release emergency funds to keep the lights on during a federal election. It’s called a 'special warrant'; an emergency dispensation of money 'urgently required for the public good.'
"Where Carney took the provision into uncharted territory is in the sheer scale of money, $73.4 billion, that he released via special warrants without the figures being approved by the House of Commons. In the snap election of 2011, by contrast, it only took $24.5 billion in special warrants to keep the federal government operational. The 2008 election required no special warrants....
"On the issue of a federal budget, Carney is also not violating any written rules in refusing to produce one. He’ll simply be breaking with more than a century of Parliamentary precedent in tabling multi-billion-dollar appropriations bills before the House of Commons with few specifics as to his government’s wider fiscal plans.
"It’s been more than five months since the federal government has actually approved funding the way it’s supposed to: Via an itemized 'money bill' that is approved in a vote by the House of Commons. The last one, for $21.6 billion, was passed on Dec. 10.... The Dec. 10 appropriations bill ... only covers four months of government spending.... There have been periods in Canadian history where the country has gone more than a year without a federal budget. But there were always extenuating circumstances. The most obvious being the failure to table a federal budget in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the midst of the Second World War, similarly, the feds went a then-record 482 days between budget presentations.
"But what hasn’t really happened before is a government refusing to table a budget in the immediate aftermath of a contentious federal election resulting in a hung parliament.... Conservative MP Mike Lake noted that the Tories had a budget ready only five weeks after their victory in the 2011 general election. Wrote Lake, 'it is entirely unacceptable for this new Carney Liberal government not to present a budget at this time of fiscal chaos caused by the previous Liberal government.'"
Read more: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/carney-is-already-steamrolling-basic-constraints-on-power
