Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis to tear into Budget 2026’s glaring contradictions. Liedtke confronts Prime Minister Carney’s $25-billion borrowed “sovereign wealth fund” against a $62-billion deficit, weigh boardroom automation deductions against Main Street burdens, expose housing infrastructure municipal funding shell games, and question Ottawa’s high-stakes gamble with Canada’s economic future.
Liedtke’s Got a Take! is on 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis Show every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, & Friday morning!
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
GENE VALAITIS: Every Friday morning at this time, we welcome back Jon Liedtke with our great feature, Liedtke’s Got a Take. And good morning, Jon.
JON LIEDTKE: Good morning, Gene.
GENE VALAITIS: Okay, more on the budget. Carney wrapped up his budget in the language of “masters of our own destiny,” I guess we could say. And as we were talking with Chris, the centerpiece is a $25-billion sovereign wealth fund. The catch though, Jon: we’re running a $62-billion deficit. Now, can a country realistically build a national wealth plan by putting the seed money on a credit card, which essentially is what they’re doing? I mean, what happens if those hand-picked investments fail?
JON LIEDTKE: (Laughs) Gene, I don’t know. Calling borrowed $25 billion a sovereign wealth fund, that is financial gaslighting. Norway built a wealth fund off of actual oil surplus. Carney is maxing out collective national credit card at 5% interest and telling us that we’re getting rich off of it. But I mean, this is straight out of Glengarry Glen Ross. He’s kicking open the doors of the House of Commons, dropping $62 billion of red ink on the desk, and telling Canadians, “Always Be Closing.” I mean, this is—it’s nuts. I mean, I just… (sighs)
Of course, though, he’s so high in the polls here that everyone’s going to go along with it, and it’s just one big gamble. So they’re going to tell us that they’re going to be picking industrial winners, but name me one major commercial venture that this bureaucracy runs on time or under budget. I mean, heck, they couldn’t even get the ArriveCAN app working without blowing $50 million.
GENE VALAITIS: (Laughs) Oh yeah, I remember that. Okay, so Ottawa is celebrating having the lowest business investment tax rate in the G7. Now, it sounds great, but it’s tailored for large companies writing off things like heavy capital equipment, industrial tech, automation. Main Street businesses carry inventory, and they pay wages, but they get left out in the cold. I mean, is this just for the corporate giants over Main Street?
JON LIEDTKE: It feels like it. I mean, this is classic Ottawa picking favorites and leaving the rest of the country to starve. And I saw, you know, the activist class like Avi Lewis—I saw him run out yesterday and get in a fight with the finance minister on live TV saying that this is a $36-billion corporate gift. But I think that misses the mark as well, because in places like Windsor, the tooling and parts shops genuinely need to be able to write off big machinery just to keep Michigan and Ohio from wiping us off the map.
So the real scandal, though, it’s not that factories are getting write-offs; it’s that Main Street gets completely written off from it. So if you’re a multi-billion multinational that’s buying heavy robotics, it’s great for you. But if you’re a local, it’s not going to be that great, because you really don’t get a darn thing. So Carney’s team drafted a budget for boardrooms and for conglomerates, because they’re fine that Main Street is going to continue to do what Main Street does, which is some will survive and some will fall, but they’d never take that risk when it comes to something bigger.
GENE VALAITIS: Yeah. This was of interest to me: the federal government claims it’s charting a course to end homelessness within 10 years by backing construction of capital infrastructure. Well, I know something about homelessness, as sadly my uncle froze to death on the streets of Toronto. But the fine print offloads ongoing shelter operations, mental health support, and front-line triage to provinces and cities that are struggling, like in the Niagara region because of those two flash floods. So, are we watching a genuine national solution—and I don’t think it’s going to happen—or just federal ministers taking credit for ribbon-cuttings and things like that?
JON LIEDTKE: You know, federal ministers love to have their photo-ops and cut ribbons on concrete or in front of, you know, fake homes that they were building—remember that one that they did a while back? And I think that there is a lot of merit here. No city that’s dealing with a homelessness epidemic like most are right now is going to be upset about the Feds saying, “Here’s a bunch of cash, we’re going to build the infrastructure to take care of, you know, the shelters themselves and the wrap-around services.” The issue is it’s the ongoing costs that are associated with it that are being downloaded onto the provinces, that’ll be downloaded directly onto the cities. So that’s what makes this a shell game here.
And even in Windsor, when they have housing funds, for example, they were mandating that we had to have fourplexes by right, whereas we already have triplexes by right. But they kept that money, and they wouldn’t give it to us unless we changed to go with it. Now, my recommendation to the city is to, you know, make the changes to get the cash, but we shouldn’t have these shell games, quite frankly, when it comes to these important issues.
GENE VALAITIS: Yeah. So Pierre Poilievre last night branded the budget “Mastered by Debt,” while the Prime Minister insists that Canada is stepping into an “investment supercycle”—his terms, not mine. Now, the sales pitch is, I guess, we can borrow today to build things up tomorrow, but servicing that debt eats up so much money. It is $2,000 a second, or $1.4 billion every week.
JON LIEDTKE: Yeah, I don’t know how you can spin this, quite frankly, because the debt is big. You know, try telling the bond market that it’s not as big as it is. When you’re not able to pay interest charges in ratios, we’re paying them in cold, hard cash on a daily basis. So debt servicing is just—it’s blowing off the charts, and that’s money that’s being taken out of our healthcare system and out of hospitals just to pay the financiers.
So, you know, we look at the sudden pivots that are in this budget, and overall, I don’t have an issue with most of what’s going on here, but it’s just—it’s always the sales pitch, right? I’d rather them just be completely honest and frank with us and say, “Hey, we’re going to continue to borrow and borrow and borrow, and we’re taking a lot of big bets right now, but we think it’s going to play off. And if it doesn’t, you don’t have to vote for us again.” The risk is, is that we can decide not to vote for them again, but that doesn’t change our financial state afterwards if things really do go bad.
GENE VALAITIS: Yeah. Picking up on what happened in Rome earlier this week, you’re calling this the “Pope versus Bob Dylan” budget: Mark Carney’s high-minded vision in white robes clashing against gritty, black-alley realities like red ink, rising debt, and political compromises. So if you strip away all of the rhetorical gymnastics, is Carney genuinely building an independent Canadian economy, or is he asking everyday Canadians to co-sign what amounts to an extraordinarily expensive gamble?
JON LIEDTKE: I think we’re all being drafted into a desperate financial pyramid scheme, potentially, here. I mean, again, it’s not being sold that way, but this budget is a massive, high-risk bet that Ottawa can spend our way out of structural economic rot before the compounding debt interest would suffocate us. And we can, you know, hope that Mark Carney, with all of his brilliant financial background, will be able to save us, but this is still the public purse, and I would rather it not be run like it’s a back-alley casino sometimes.
Now listen: stockpiling critical minerals, that’s a very good thing, and if we’re able to do it with maple syrup, we should probably be doing it with critical minerals as well. I don’t think that’s a problem. But I don’t know how you can say that we’re masters of our own house and masters of our own destiny when we’re mortgaging the house a second time.
GENE VALAITIS: Yeah, and third, and fourth, and fifth, and sixth. Yeah. Hey, listen: great takes all week. Have a fantastic weekend. We’ll talk to you on Monday, my friend.
JON LIEDTKE: Thanks, Gene. Talk to you then.
GENE VALAITIS: There he goes: Jon Liedtke. Liedtke’s Got a Take.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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