OTTAWA — The 2024 federal budget represents a continuation of the Trudeau government’s orgy of spending financed by debt and higher taxes.

It is obviously bad economics, so much so that it is hard to treat it as a serious attempt at coherent economic policymaking. Years of debt-financed government spending and rising taxes have resulted in what is now widely-acknowledged as a national productivity crisis. With low investment and productivity hampering potential output, the Bank of Canada estimates the economy is within 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points of its capacity limit.