OTTAWA — The federal government posted a deficit of $5.36 billion for the first five months of its 2026-27 fiscal year.
In its monthly fiscal monitor report, the Finance Department says the result compared with a deficit of $11.07 billion in the same April-to-August period a year earlier.
Peter Polyestre’s people are gonna try to make THE BIGGEST hay bale of this.
It’s the only thing they have available.
I don’t understand some comments. The budget deficit almost halved compared to the same period last year, with revenues totalling $215.5 billion (+ $14.4 billion or 7.1%), and expenses totalling $220.9 billion (+ $8.6 billion or 4.1%).
The most important single expense appears to be the public-debt charges which climbed 16.1%, but I don’t see what this has to do with AI or the like.
So, couple things.
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The deficit will almost certainly be higher than that when the dust settles. A lot of invoices come due in month 11 or 12.
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Ordinarily I’d say it’s people using this to try to shoehorn their hatred of AI into the conversation, but part of the reason for this specific deficit is Canada just this week took equity in Cohere.
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And Anthropic posted an $80B in the first half of 2026, keep that in mind when you decide whether you want to spend your money on AI subscriptions or your country.
The big 400MW data centre project announced for Tupper Point in Nova Scotia and touted as a big invest-in-Canada win is going have Anthropic as its anchor resident on a 20-year lease. We’re all tied up together.
Well, our country’s spending money on AI so…
They have plans to increase their budget, I know some of it is slowly starting but I think only one of them is a good idea.
- Financial services: Build partnerships with financial service providers to offer selective retail banking services.
- Canada Shops: Host an ecommerce platform to connect Canadian consumers with Canadian-owned and operated businesses.
- Multi-channel advertising: Offer advertisers multi-channel advertising opportunities that reach physical and digital audiences.
- New adjacent services: New potential adjacent services within our existing network include government services, support for peer-to-peer marketplaces, and products and services for small businesses. Additional opportunities will be identified, assessed and pursued where appropriate.
I do a lot to avoid advertisments, because capatialism is horrible. I have a no ads sticker in my mailbox, so I only get political things and the occasional addressed to “home owner”/“resident” things. I have a finally tuned pihole, I use adguard and sponserblock for youtube, I have a very complex email setup that block ads, and if I could I would get rid of my mastercard (not that I see ads from it but because they can see where I shop the one tracker I cannot block). Canada Shops would be something I would like to see.
*edit I misread the title of the article and jumped to conclusions, it is not about Canada Post.
I considered not telling you this is not an article about Canada Post. :)
🤪
I read the headline the same way you did at first, but this article is about the federal government’s deficit, not Canada Post.
Thank you. I am laughing at myself right now.
I don’t need them to build another Shopify or some bullshit. Build a payment processor that doesn’t cost so much to use. Make it platform agnostic. You don’t help small businesses by kneecaping other small businesses (web developers).
This is what happens when we elect the fiscally responsible party! Which, as always, is…
checks notes…
The Liberals?! What happened there?? /s
We fired Trudeau. Now if someone could just do that with Ford and the PC’s, since this province refuses to vote NDP and the OLP are a joke.
Versus who? The Conservatives?
The joke I was trying to make is that it’s The Conversative party that’s supposed to be “fiscally responsible”, but the Liberals always do better. But it clearly didn’t land.
In anticipation of someone asking how this is good, I think cutting the deficit in half is good.
(From the perspective of less debt – I’m not necessarily agreeing with the measures used to reduce the deficit)
Ah, it sounded like you were saying the opposite.
