In a satirical column published on December 5, 2025, Franco Terrazzano, the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, outlined a five-step guide to creative government accounting. The piece, framed as advice for Prime Minister Mark Carney, uses humor to critique federal fiscal management and is based on real-world budgetary practices.
The Five-Step Plan for Fiscal Creativity
The column's first step advises the government to balance only half the budget. Instead of cutting the full $78 billion needed, Terrazzano suggests splitting the budget and balancing just one side, while obscuring the continued borrowing on the other. The strategy relies on jargon like a fiscal anchor based on balancing day-to-day operating spending by 2028, hoping Canadians won't notice that freezing spending could balance the operating budget sooner.
Step two focuses on crafting a misleading slogan. The initial, overly honest draft—Taking on more debt to spend more on capital—is rejected in favor of the catchier but deceptive Spend less to invest more. The disclaimer notes that slogans don't alter mathematics, quoting a former Liberal prime minister on the quicksand of compound interest.
Relabeling Spending and Promising Future Cuts
The third step is a straightforward reclassification: don't cut spending, just re-label it as capital investment. The column suggests moving up to $94 billion in operating spending into the capital budget. This creates the illusion of reduced operating costs while maintaining expenditure. Terrazzano warns that the Parliamentary Budget Officer could criticize this as an overly expansive definition of capital.
Step four involves the classic political maneuver of promising future savings without immediate action. The guide recommends prominently advertising $60 billion in savings over five years while quietly increasing overall spending by $100 billion over the same period. The real numbers, it suggests, should be buried 239 pages into the budget annex. The disclaimer points to historical examples like Saskatchewan's New Democrats, who eventually had to make dramatic cuts, including hospital closures, due to soaring interest.
Shifting Goalposts and Muzzling Watchdogs
The final official step is to change the fiscal guardrails. This involves switching the key metric from reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio to reducing the deficit-to-GDP ratio, banking on public confusion between debt and deficit. The strategy includes touting Canada's lowest net debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7 as justification for more borrowing, while the disclaimer notes that net debt calculations can treat Canada Pension Plan funds as a raidable asset.
The column adds a bonus step: muzzling independent budget watchdogs. When official reports reveal uncomfortable truths, the advice is to muddy the waters with competing analysts or, more effectively, seek a new budget officer with tact and discretion—implying a preference for a lapdog over a watchdog.
Conclusion and Core Disclaimer
Terrazzano concludes that this creative accounting is so easy that even a rookie politician like Prime Minister Mark Carney could implement it. The overarching disclaimer for the entire plan, however, delivers the critical punchline: All of this assumes Canadians are ignorant and won't notice the soaring debt and interest charges. The column frames this as the significant risk of such a strategy, highlighting the real-world consequences of opaque fiscal management.
