Canada

Those are two very different parts. Dealing with the American shitstorm is approached with enhanced trade routes etc. You might look at the broad overview here: https://budget.canada.ca/2025/report-rapport/chap1-en.html

On the greener path, sure, there's a new nuclear plant, carbon capture (not my ideal but probably a reasonable compromise with our oil dependent provinces) Wind West Atlantic and of course, holding onto the industrial carbon price. (The only realistic non Liberal government would be the Conservatives who have been opposed to that since inception.)

there are parts I’d like more of

If I had my magic wand, I'd probably like more green projects, probably some higher wealth taxes though disentangling those from capital investment is tricky etc. I'd also like to keep expanding the national daycare program.

other[s] of which I’d like less

Personally, I'm not entirely sold on a massive military budget buuuuuuuuut, I'm not wildly opposed. There are a few tax cuts that I think are a little silly (luxury jets seems fucking dumb. I hope they catch that somewhere else) and frankly, I didn't love the gigantic tax cut at the beginning, though I'm in a pretty privileged position etc.

(I haven't seen a good explanation of why we needed to increase the public sector by 20% since then, nor of what we got out of that. If you have anything, I'd love to read it!)

Here's an easy explanation: we didn't have enough.

Wait times are no fun, right? Need more people to process the things, or you need to remove some of the regulatory steps involved. Both those, the doing of the work and the fruitless "just make it faster" boondoggles, need meatbags to do the doing.

You now how we can tell we didn't have enough? WAIT TIMES. When it's zero, you may have too many staff. When it's a day, you're probably just right. Show me a wait time report and I'll show you 12 months in processing delays that we should have avoided by grabbing an intelligent peon and making them do some things of the things that need doing -- because processing delays and wait times are absolutely the shits right now.

QED

I don't have anything in particular, as I haven't seen details, but the public service exists to serve the public, cutting the workforce ends up reducing services. Since we're on the edge of a recession I'd say tax the billionaires, go back and charge Google for the billions that we were supposed to get before Carney bowed down to trump. We will now also have many unemployed more unemployed people which causes strains in other areas. I remain unconvinced that cuts for austerity purposes are ultimately beneficial, raise taxes on the ultra wealthy instead

Generally speaking, reducing public servants increases consultancy requirements, not reduces.

If you don't have someone with the capabilites/skills/corporate knowledge/experince/capacity to do X thing on the payroll, then you need to hire a consultant to do it.

Now obviously I couldn't tell you what ministry/department/etc needs, but let's take the Alto contract as an isolated example.

We don't have any rail expertise in government at all, so we need to consult it in, and we pay a premium for that. In the lens of a single rail project, that makes a a lot of sense, we aren't paying payroll and maintaining expertise for a once in a generation project.

The alternative is having something like a national rail crown corp or department, like SNCF in France. Now all the experience is at the national level whenever you need it. SNCF has a lot more staff, planning, and engineering capacity than it requires; so that gets farmed out to regions and municipalities to help them with their rail/metro/tram projects. This is instead of each of them needing consultants, driving up the costs for municipal governments/capital projects.

In this manner increased federal spending becomes an accelerant for other levels of government and reduces regional and municipal spending, and thus the overall tax burden for everyone.

So if we had something like SNCF then the Alto project might cost a little more, but the Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto, and Montréal recent/ongoing lines would be cheaper; plus medium cities like Victoria, Winnipeg, Québec City, and Halifax would have rail projects in their reach; and smaller cities like Red Deer, Regina, Thunder Bay, Kingston, Trois Rivières, and Fredericton would have tram projects in their reach.

That's how all politics works. You can't make everyone happy, so you just try to make every less unhappy.

I think its more likely the NDP just abstain enough that it passes. And apparently there is a member crossing the floor today from the Cons to the Libs so they only need a few abstentions to pass. I dont think the Cons will to abstain because of the optics.

Yeah I think some Conservatives abstaining is the most likely path. Much as they'd like to I don't think the NDP (or Elizabeth May) are going to want to be seen as enabling it.

If the Conservatives don't make it happen, their party may just get its own chance to fail to pass their first budget very soon.