Stuck and retreating: the state of Canada, 2026

Two new reports show the scale of the challenge the Carney government faces

A panel from the Coalition for a Better Future’s Scorecard report

Joni Mitchell’s happy, but how are the rest of us doing? Today I want to shine a light on two new reports from interested third parties that suggest the Carney government is showing real progress delivering on its promises — but that the accumulated momentum of lacklustre economic performance will be hard to reverse.

The two reports:

Build Canada last week launched its Outcomes Tracker, which tracks the Carney government’s record of keeping public promises. Those promises are scraped from the 2025 Liberal election platform last April, the Throne Speech that King Charles delivered last May, and from François-Philippe Champagne’s federal budget in November. This is essentially an open-source, arms-length version of the Trudeau government’s “Mandate Letter Tracker” from 2019, which was not a resounding PR success and which received no follow-up.

What’s Build Canada? “A non-partisan civic movement,” says its About page. It’s mostly tech people who were impatient with late Trudeau-ism. Some of the names on its About page have history in Conservative or Liberal governments. Most don’t. One, the academic and former journalist Andrew Potter, is an old friend. The Walrus published this fabulously sour account. I take the group to be operating in good faith.

What have they found? Of 603 “commitments” in the Liberal platform, throne speech and budget, 181 are “completed.” That’s about 30%. Only 5 are “broken,” and the rest, 288 or nearly half, are “in progress.” Here’s a screen shot of the dashboard:

What accounts for the giant late-inning increase in promises marked “completed”? That figure nearly tripled last week. That’s because the Budget Implementation Act received royal assent, moving dozens of measures from pending to funded.

Here’s the list of “broken” promises. The size of the public service wasn’t capped, Evan Solomon didn’t deliver his AI strategy by year’s end, and the debt-to-GDP ratio isn’t declining. Here’s the list of “completed” promises, some quite modest. The whole list is broken down by cabinet minister, if you like. The whole process is open-sourced on Github, involves a lot of AI scraping of public documents, and is a good accountability exercise. What the hell do all those people in Ottawa even do? Some of them are trying to “Migrate government IT workloads from legacy data centres to modern facilities,” a promise that moved from “not started” to “in progress” two months ago. Now you know.

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It’s good for governments to do what they promised. One worry is that keeping promises won’t change reality, because government promised the wrong thing, or not enough of the right thing, or because the world is getting worse faster than government can try to make things better.

This is the theme of the latest report from the Coalition for a Better Future, which is more than 120 business groups and think tanks, fronted by former cabinet ministers Anne McLellan and Lisa Raitt. Writing about the group’s creation five years ago, I cracked open the snark jar and wondered aloud whether it was too big and too part-time to have any influence. I called it a “support group” for people who wished a Liberal government would care about the economy, or a Conservative government about governance.

It’s a useful group now, however, because it is relatively unmoved by a fresh face or a single speech. Its latest report (download a .pdf here) is full of the near-frantic urgency that characterizes most reports on Canada’s economy, but also some useful information. Its title is “Time to Execute: Canada’s Crucible Moment,” and it says things like, “We either choose to build and compete—or risk being left behind.”

So far, Canadians aren’t building. From the report:

“For years, the Coalition has warned that our economic foundation was thinning; in 2026, we have turned the corner into critical territory. Canadian workers receive approximately 55 cents of new capital investment for every $1 received by their U.S. counterparts. The gap is even wider in the ‘tools’ of the future: We receive only 41 cents on the dollar for machinery and equipment (M&E) and a dismal 32 cents for intellectual property (IP) products like software and R&D.”

A sputtering economy trickles bad news down. Food prices rose 4.7% year-over-year in late 2025, double the general inflation rate. Household debt is 177% of disposable income. The poverty gap is widening. Business R&D investment continues to lag most peer countries.

In an interesting twist, this business-affiliated group says not all the blame lies with governments. “Ultimately, the heaviest responsibility rests with the private sector. While the current environment is highly uncertain given the geopolitical context, there is an abundance of opportunities as Canada seeks to derisk the supply chain and build stronger trading relationships with other countries, and as we are increasingly viewed as a reliable partner. It is up to corporate boards and management to move beyond hesitation and embrace the risks required for genuine innovation.”

Move beyond hesitation? Excellent idea. You go first.

I’m not aware of another country whose business sector puts so much energy into writing diagnostic reports. We have mixed success as a country at applying lessons, but my God we’re good at teaching them.