Orkidnut (Shirley)

"I reached out to Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney of The Line for their views, and this is what Gurney had to say. “The Line can compete. It has to — it's how we survive. We always knew operating an independent business against competitors that were prepared to accept subsidies would be difficult. We just didn't realize, and probably should have, that the government would keep making it more and more difficult. But we remain convinced that our original choice was the correct one. Accepting zero subsidies gives us a degree of independence that is, to us, priceless. And it also means that if some future government chooses to change or outright scrap the subsidies, we'll have nothing to worry about. We wouldn't sell that peace of mind for anything."" @the_lineca

CBC’s At Issue buried the real budget criticism in the YouTube bonus In the online-only extra, Andrew Coyne finally said it plainly: “Moving in the wrong direction is they are going to increase and indeed entrench subsidies to the news media to our business. I thought this was a bad idea when they first introduced it… it was going to be this temporary emergency stopgap… Well, once we got our hooks into the public taxpayer, you’ll never get us off it. So in fact, they’re increasing the amount of and they’re going to make it pretty much permanent. And they’ve expanded it beyond just the newspaper business now into audio visual. This is not good for the future of the news business in this country.” The response? An immediate pivot from Rosie to “Your letter stamps are going up to $2… Canada Post isn’t doing well. 7% escalator after. Oh, dear.” A panelist on the public broadcaster admits the temporary media bailout is now permanent and expanding, and the room answers with postage rates. That is the entire engagement with the most obvious conflict of interest in the budget @acoyne @RosieBarton @althiaraj

Andrew Coyne is bothered by Budget 2026 “They took that revenue windfall, that spending windfall, and they spent virtually all of it. At a time when economists are practically begging them, would you please get serious about the deficit and the debt.” “There’s very little on the productivity front. It’s just more or less the same as that last budget last year, which was such a disappointment.” “The issue is it’s got to all add up… in a half a trillion dollar budget [you should] find savings elsewhere.” @acoyne

Lisa Raitt questioned the budget’s assumption of 20% year-on-year revenue growth from Crown corporations. “I have no idea how they’re going to get that out of crown corporations, to be honest,” she said. “I had them in my portfolio. They… are not known to be able to increase the revenues 20% year on year over the next five years.” She stressed that the fiscal plan depends on revenues materializing to offset rising debt. “Unless the rabbit coming out of the hat is increased revenues somewhere along the way… what are the revenues going to be?” Raitt asked, noting bond rating agencies will ask whether “Canada [can] actually create the revenues to offset all this debt” and warning that without projects generating returns in the next two years: “it ain’t going to be pretty” She also pointed to practical hurdles, including long investment horizons of “half decade to decade” versus short political cycles, and the risk that major machinery-of-government changes will push institutions into “navel gazing” testing whether the public sector can still deliver results quickly @lraitt

CBC covers for Carney’s budget. Cost: $300M Budget 2026 gives CBC/Radio-Canada an extra $300 million over two years From CBC’s own panel: “Canadians are willing to give this government and this prime minister a lot of room to try things for now.” Opposition calls it a “credit card budget… built on the back of debt.” Debt charges projected to hit $85.5 billion a year Who needs publicists?