opinion

“Look at 1945,” Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne told reporters outside the federal cabinet’s two-day meeting in Toronto, when asked repeatedly about the budget he is expected to deliver next month.

It’s pretty unusual for a finance minister to compare his coming budget to the end of the Second World War, so one might have guessed it would provide some revealing clue about the first fiscal blueprint of the Carney government. But it didn’t reveal much.

Mr. Champagne seemed quite taken with the analogy, which in his telling was about a moment in history when it was time to rebuild Canada. He mentioned it four times and referenced the legendary role of then-reconstruction minister C.D. Howe, who is credited with engineering Canada’s industrial economy. Mr. Champagne tal

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