As a young boy, I would watch my mom diligently read the newspapers and the flyers that came with them. She would cut out coupons and tuck them away for the next trip to the store.

Today, newspaper coupons have been replaced by a flood of digital ones: app notifications, email blasts, loyalty offers and so on. Frankly, I get exhausted by all the coupon noise and simply ignore it. Over the past decade or so — particularly in the last year — I have come to feel much the same way about Canadian

tax policy

.

I have one hope for the federal government’s

spring economic update

on Tuesday: no new coupons and significant expenditure reductions.

Canada has developed a coupon-book tax policy over the past 16 months. What started under the Justin Trudeau government with a poorly thought-out two-month GST “holiday” from December 2024 to February 2025 has been expanded, rebranded and extended by the

Mark Carney

government into a rolling calendar of temporary measures, each one felt at a moment (the till, the pump, the direct-deposit date).

On April 14, the day after the by-elections that converted his minority into a majority (with the crucial help of the floor-crossers), Carney announced the fuel excise suspension and, in the same breath, pre-announced that the spring update would include “some restructuring of already announced measures.”

Translation: more coupons may be on the way. The question is whether they expand the book or replace it with something that resembles actual policy.

The C.D. Howe Institute last week published a

report

, Fiscal fantasy: Believe it or not, fiscal reality hasn’t gone away, but its view of the economic update was unambiguous.

“Growth in the economy and government revenues is feeble — in part because high taxes and excessive borrowing are discouraging work and investment. Spending has roared ahead,” it said. “The federal government’s upcoming spring economic update must prefigure a change to fiscal realism. It must not feature more boondoggles like the juiced-up GST tax credit or its recent suspension of the fuel tax — another debt-financed handout that will do nothing for growth.”

Former

Bank of Canada

governor David Dodge made a similar

point

last week: the government needs to cut, not simply spend and borrow more.

The Department of Finance on Saturday

reported

a $31.2-billion budgetary deficit for the 10 months ending Jan. 31, 2026. With the budget in November projecting a full-year deficit of roughly $78 billion, government supporters and friendly pundits promptly suggested the year-end number might come in well below budget.

But what they omitted is that the $31.2 billion does not include an additional $51.4 billion in “non-budgetary requirements” — predominantly loans, investments and advances that the government’s new

capital budgeting framework

would likely classify as capital — bringing the actual 10-month financial requirement to $82.6 billion. This

sleight-of-hand accounting

is deceptive and misleading.

The longer-run warnings are serious. C.D. Howe estimates that combining the 2026 federal budget with the provincial budgets points to a national net debt ratio climbing to approximately 82 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2028–29 from roughly 66 per cent pre-pandemic.

Every province is running a deficit. Every province projects net debt rising faster than GDP. This is the trajectory Canada travelled in the 1970s and 1980s before the mid-1990s’ reckoning forced spending cuts and some tax reforms that set up two decades of growth.

The intellectual dishonesty runs through all of it. The federal consumer carbon tax was cancelled on April 1, 2025, a political retreat disguised as policy. Exactly one year and 19 days later, the same government is subsidizing fuel consumption through forgone excise revenue while a climate agenda is still claimed.

The government is essentially paying people to burn the carbon they claim to be taxing through the industrial carbon tax. One of these positions has to give.

What Canada needs today is not a new coupon. The prescription has been on the table for years, seen in C.D. Howe’s work, in Dodge’s warnings and in economist Jack Mintz’s

Big Bang

tax reform proposals that I fully support. A realistic fiscal baseline. A credible path back to balance. Spending restraint benchmarked to mid-to-late 2010s levels. Tax reform that encourages work and private investment. The diagnosis does not vary.

My mom’s coupon clipping was at least predictable. She read the same flyers each week and knew what would be there. Canadian taxpayers and small business owners have no such luxury. Their coupons arrive by press release, start and end randomly and come with related administrative burdens — all so the government can announce so-called relief that will be felt for exactly as long as it takes the next news cycle to roll in.

I ignore the digital coupon noise because it exhausts me. Canadians deserve a tax system they don’t have to ignore to stay sane.

Unfortunately, I’m not optimistic that our current government agrees. Coupon hand-outs are too politically rewarding.

  • Don’t expect Carney’s looming spring budget update to reflect the financial pain Canadians are feeling
  • Forcing people to pay a moral tax if they leave the country won’t inspire them to stay

Kim Moody, FCPA, FCA, TEP, is the founder of Moodys Tax/Moodys Private Client, a former chair of the Canadian Tax Foundation, former chair of the Society of Estate Practitioners (Canada) and has held many other leadership positions in the Canadian tax community. He can be reached at kgcm@kimgcmoody.com and his LinkedIn profile is https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimgcmoody.

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