Trade and Privatization Campaigner Nikolas Barry-Shaw was in budget lockup last week, and shared his takeaways. He sees a massive corporate tax cut that overwhelmingly favours oil companies, a drastic rise in military spending that will benefit US arms dealers, and a privatization push that starts with airports but will quickly move to other public infrastructure.
For a more in-depth look at the budget, check out The Breach Show, where Nikolas was invited for a 30-minute discussion about what is in the budget. They also discuss corporate Canada’s reaction to the budget.
Here’s the key exchange between Nikolas and The Breach editor Martin Lukacs (you can read the full transcript on The Breach’s site):
ML: So, just to break it down for people, there’s a process of consultation where interest groups, corporate lobby groups, corporations, and certainly environmental groups and others will submit a series of recommendations that they’d like and the government trails through them and then decides what to prioritize.
NBS: Yeah, absolutely. And so in this pre-budget consultation process, they prepared a document which outlined what they wanted to have done, and usually it’s very detailed and there’s many, many, many questions.
This time there were four points and they were extremely thin and they basically had nothing to ask for. There was one thing that they were asking for really off the top which was corporate tax cuts and they got some of that but not all of that.
But I think the thing that struck me was not that they were asking for corporate tax cuts. CEOs ask for tax cuts all the time, but that they didn’t really have anything else to ask for. It was this really empty document. And I think that speaks to the fact that Carney is so ahead of them in terms of implementing their own agenda that they don’t even know what to ask for at this point.
ML: They’re getting practically everything they want. I was struck too how, in the business press, there really wasn’t a loud public clamour pre-budget from the corporate class. You get the sense that they’re really feeling confident about the direction of the Carney government in terms of taking care of their interests.
The budget bears out the conclusions of Nikolas Barry-Shaw’s analysis of Bill C-39, “Who’s on the menu in Carney’s omnibus bill?,” published in Canadian Dimension, which follows the Prime Minister’s decisionmaking to its source.
Canada’s CEOs have been celebrating the legislation—and with reason. The bill’s multifaceted assault on labour rights, environmental standards, and international and treaty obligations to First Nations is perfectly aligned with the long-standing aims of Corporate Canada.
In the boardrooms of Canada’s leading corporations, executives view environmental rules as unnecessary “red tape” and First Nations’ land rights as obstacles to be bulldozed. They see workers exercising their right to strike as a cancer that must be stopped “before they metastasize,” a problem that governments should “permanently resolve” through legislation, their lobbyists at the Business Council of Canada suggest.
[…]
No one has been more solicited for input than the Business Council of Canada. CEO Hyder told Politico that the Carney government “has been full of outreach,” so much so that the corporate lobby group struggled to keep up with the invitations. “It has been from the highest levels on down. It has been very consultative. It has been engaging.”
Federal lobbying records confirm this pro-corporate orientation. Between May 1, 2025, and May 31, 2026, the Business Council of Canada met with Prime Minister Carney and his top advisors 31 times, including six times with the prime minister himself, an Investigative Journalism Fund analysis found. Apart from the Hamilton-based steel company ArcelorMittal Dofasco, the CEO lobby group scored more meetings with the Prime Minister’s Office than any other organization.
According to the Business Council, Canada’s future lies in a resource-focused, export-oriented economy. In a July 2025 report, the corporate lobby group called for “a coherent and ambitious policy framework designed to safeguard investments over multiple decades.” Getting resources out of the ground and off to international markets, however, required the federal government to remove the obstacles currently standing in the way.
Council’s brand-new Director of Membership and Development Strategy, Muneeb Javaid, added his take in another piece in Canadian Dimension published over the weekend:
In fact, the budget’s new corporate tax breaks will disproportionately benefit the very industries already profiting from global instability. According to an analysis by David Macdonald of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 29 percent of the benefits from the government’s new “productivity mega deduction” will flow to oil extraction and refining, with another 10 percent going to mining. ConocoPhillips, one of the world’s largest oil companies, has already welcomed Ottawa’s shifting energy policies as an opportunity to expand its oil sands operations.
This inaction persists despite overwhelming domestic appetite for change. A broad coalition of civic organizations, climate advocacy groups, and labour unions recently issued an open letter calling on the federal government to implement an excess profits tax on energy companies, directing those revenues toward immediate cost-of-living relief and green infrastructure transition. Public opinion strongly backs this approach. Recent national polling shows that two in three Canadians, 66 percent, support a tax on the excess profits of oil and gas companies, with support cutting across regional lines and peaking at over 76 percent when the measure specifically addresses affordability. A much smaller faction of the electorate opposes the measure, leaving the government out of step with public sentiment.