Éric Blais: Doug Ford aims to protect Ontario. Mark Carney says Canada can shape its own destiny - Toronto Star

Carney is setting a bar Ford has been careful not to set for himself. Ontario is where we'll find out whether he can clear it. 

Federal Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne speaks at a Canadian Club breakfast in Toronto on Monday, ahead of releasing the latest federal budget on Thursday, which is labelled “Masters of our destiny” in English. 

Éric Blais is president of Headspace Marketing in Toronto and the author of "Normal Nation: How Normalcy Could Play in a Third Québec Referendum."

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s budget, due Thursday, makes a bold promise on its cover: “Masters of our destiny.” It’s a confident line for a Canada determined to remain sovereign. It also echoes William Ernest Henley’s 1875 poem Invictus: “I am the master of my fate.”

Henley wrote it from a hospital bed after losing a leg. He wasn’t claiming control over what happened to him. All he could control was how he faced it. If you read the budget’s title the way Henley meant it, “masters of our destiny” is a promise about resolve more than outcomes. But a budget, unlike a poem, is measured on results.

Churchill borrowed the line in 1941, but he first warned that it was no time for boasts or glowing prophecies. That’s precisely what a budget offers, in numbers.

Ontarians have been hearing a different word. Doug Ford asked them to let him protect Ontario and they returned him to office. And his government’s advertising has been reminding us ever since.

Last Thursday, Ontario Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy showed what that protection looks like on paper. The deficit for this year is now projected at $16.9 billion, up from $13.8 billion in March. Balancing the books has been pushed back to 2029-30.

Premier Doug Ford carries the budget into the legislature last Thursday. 

Bethlenfalvy blamed U.S. tariffs on steel, autos and manufacturing and the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz driving up energy prices. The result, he said, was a world “awash in a sea of instability.” Then came a line I suspect we’ll hear again: “While I’d like to balance today, I’m also a realist.”

Ford aims to protect us while Mark Carney claims to master our destiny. The difference is more than semantics.

In advertising, a slogan is a promise and a promise is a yardstick. Even more so on a budget cover.

“Protect” is a defensive promise that comes with an excuse included. When things go wrong, you point at the threat outside.