In late September 2025, Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), Jason Jacques, delivered one of the most sobering warnings in recent Canadian fiscal discourse. His latest projections estimate that the federal deficit will rise from CAD 51.7 billion in 2024–25 (approximately 1.7 percent of GDP) to CAD 68.5 billion in 2025–26 (about 2.2 percent of GDP). Over the medium term, the federal debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to climb from 41.7 percent to above 43 percent. What made Jacques’s testimony particularly striking was less the numbers themselves—few dispute their accuracy—than the rhetoric that accompanied them. Warning that Canada was “at the precipice,” Jacques adopted a register rarely employed by technocratic forecasters, signaling not merely fiscal strain but the potential onset of what Prime Minister Mark Carney has elsewhere described as a “structural rupture” in the global economic order.
Canada’s fiscal situation, however, does not exist in isolation. Across the Atlantic, Poland offers a revealing comparative lens. In August 2025, Polish Finance Minister Andrzej Domański acknowledged that Warsaw’s fiscal deficit would reach 6.9 percent of GDP in 2025, significantly above earlier estimates of roughly 6.3 percent, with only a marginal improvement to 6.5 percent projected for 2026. Poland’s general government debt, currently around 58 percent of GDP, is expected to climb further, reaching 65.3 percent by 2026. On the surface, these figures appear proportionally far more severe than Canada’s trajectory. Yet market reaction has been notably restrained. Benchmark ten-year bond yields have hovered near 5.5 percent throughout mid-2025—elevated relative to pre-pandemic levels but hardly indicative of imminent crisis. Moreover, Poland’s growth outlook remains comparatively robust, with real GDP expansion projected at 3.0–3.5 percent in 2025, supported by EU recovery funds, substantial infrastructure investment, and strong export performance.
The juxtaposition of Ottawa and Warsaw illustrates a fundamental lesson in fiscal political economy: not all deficits are created equal. Market tolerance for sustained deficits depends less on headline figures than on their composition, strategic orientation, and growth implications. In Poland, large deficits are justified—at least temporarily—by heavy investment in defense, infrastructure, and EU-funded modernization projects. Investors appear willing to grant leeway so long as spending is plausibly growth-enhancing. Canada’s situation is more ambiguous. While Ottawa retains strong institutional credibility, relatively low borrowing costs by G7 standards, and a debt burden well below that of most advanced economies, much of its new fiscal expansion is directed toward social transfers and consumption, raising questions about long-term productivity returns.
This contrast underscores a broader insight: fiscal sustainability is not merely a matter of arithmetic but of context. Growth expectations, market perceptions, and the balance between investment and consumption all shape the threshold at which deficits become destabilizing. Poland’s trajectory demonstrates both the possibilities and limits of strategic deficit financing—possibilities Canada may wish to emulate in terms of productive investment, but limits it cannot afford to ignore given slower growth prospects, demographic pressures, and structural exposure to U.S. trade and monetary policy.
The Asymmetry Problem in Fiscal Forecasting
At the methodological core of Jacques’s warning lies the use of a “status-quo baseline”—a projection that assumes continuity in existing policies, tax regimes, and spending commitments, adjusted only for demographic changes and external macroeconomic conditions. This approach has long been standard in parliamentary budget offices, valued for its transparency and comparability across time. In Jacques’s latest assessment, the baseline assumes real GDP growth between 1.2 and 1.8 percent annually, incorporates trade-related headwinds from slowing U.S. demand and global supply chain frictions, and projects forward under current fiscal rules. The result is a familiar pattern: widening deficits, rising debt ratios, and constrained fiscal flexibility.
Yet baseline projections carry an intrinsic asymmetry that becomes particularly salient in periods of structural change. Downside risks—trade shocks, interest-rate spikes, recessions, or policy inertia—are typically integrated into sensitivity analyses and occasionally into the baseline itself. Upside potential—such as gains from successful trade diversification, returns on major infrastructure investment, or firm-level adaptation to global shifts—is usually treated as scenario analysis, “possible but uncertain.” While this asymmetry is defensible in stable periods, when historical relationships hold and policy shifts are incremental, it becomes increasingly problematic when global economic and geopolitical structures are being reconfigured.
Poland’s recent fiscal trajectory illustrates this asymmetry vividly. Between 2021 and 2024, Poland’s budget deficit expanded from 1.7 percent to 6.6 percent of GDP, driven by expenditures that would alarm conventional forecasters: surging pension commitments, extensive infrastructure investments, and defense spending that has risen sharply from 2 percent of GDP in 2021 to 4.7 percent by 2025. In February 2025, President Andrzej Duda announced a €30 billion defense budget, making Poland’s military expenditure the largest relative to GDP among NATO members. These decisions reflect a strategic choice: the deliberate acceptance of elevated deficits in exchange for capacity-building, a fiscal strategy that markets have thus far tolerated, signaling that not all deficits are treated equally.
Jacques’s methodology, by contrast, treats such policy reorientations as low-probability scenarios rather than plausible baselines. His models assume policy continuity, projecting outcomes if Canada maintains current spending patterns, tax policies, and regulatory frameworks. Poland demonstrates that, under certain conditions, countries can rapidly restructure fiscal priorities within months in response to geopolitical imperatives. In Poland’s case, proximity to Ukraine and perceived Russian threats prompted immediate, politically supported investment.
For Canada, the analogy is instructive. Pressures to diversify trade beyond the United States, invest heavily in climate infrastructure and clean energy, and meet enhanced defense obligations under NATO and NORAD could drive a similar recalibration. If such structural shifts occur, Jacques’s status-quo baseline risks systematically underestimating both the fiscal pressures Canada will face and the potential growth and resilience benefits of strategic investment.
The Composition Blindness of Deficit Metrics
When Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed the United Nations General Assembly in late September 2025, he outlined a vision of Canada responding to trade disruptions not through retrenchment but through strategic expansion. Carney emphasized trade diversification with a particular focus on Asia, investments in trade-enabling infrastructure, and comprehensive “Buy Canadian” procurement policies designed to strengthen domestic supply chains. Earlier that month, he had announced measures to support businesses affected by U.S. tariffs, including raising loan limits for canola producers to CAD 500,000, expanding agricultural marketing initiatives, and promoting alternative export markets. These initiatives represent a deliberate effort to transform the composition of economic activity, rather than simply its aggregate volume—a distinction that conventional fiscal metrics often fail to capture.
Poland’s experience underscores the importance of this distinction. Total public investment in Poland exceeds 5 percent of GDP, driven by accelerated military equipment procurement, transport infrastructure projects, and energy sector investments. Unlike consumption spending, which temporarily boosts demand, these expenditures build long-term productive capacity, altering the underlying structure of the economy. Poland’s GDP per capita has more than doubled since 2005, and despite the inflationary shock of 2022–23, growth continues to outpace many European Union peers, reflecting market confidence that elevated deficits can finance capacity-enhancing investments rather than short-term consumption.
Jacques’s baseline methodology, by contrast, exhibits what might be called composition blindness. In the PBO framework, a dollar of deficit is treated as equivalent regardless of purpose—whether it funds pension increases, defense procurement, infrastructure projects, or health care consumption. The model aggregates spending, revenue, and debt service costs, applying historical elasticities and growth assumptions to project forward. While technically consistent, this approach fails to differentiate between expenditures that generate long-term returns and those that merely sustain current demand. If the returns to strategic infrastructure, energy transition, or trade-enhancing investment exceed historical norms—because regulatory barriers have been lowered, because foreign partners are actively seeking Canadian critical minerals and energy, or because firms respond more elastically to new market opportunities than historical data suggest—then the baseline systematically underestimates the upside potential of deficit financing.
This is not merely theoretical. Carney has explicitly framed Canada’s situation as a “structural rupture” that requires policy responses breaking with historical patterns. In his September 5, 2025, address announcing measures to protect strategic industries, he emphasized that Canadian businesses and workers face disruptions unlike those of previous trade adjustments. If Carney’s diagnosis is correct—that current economic conditions represent a fundamental break from historical relationships—then models calibrated to past elasticities and conventional fiscal rules will produce forecasts that are technically precise but strategically misleading. By failing to account for the composition and strategic impact of spending, such models risk overstating fiscal vulnerability while underestimating the potential benefits of targeted, forward-looking investments.
Market Signals and the Growth Premium
A central gap in Jacques’s methodology concerns the interaction between fiscal trajectory and market confidence. His baseline incorporates sensitivity analysis for interest rates, recognizing that rising borrowing costs can escalate debt service, potentially creating a self-reinforcing spiral of deficits. History offers stark reminders: countries such as Argentina and Greece experienced rapid fiscal deterioration not due to discretionary spending but because financing costs overwhelmed revenues.
Poland demonstrates a contrasting dynamic. Despite a 6.9 percent deficit and debt approaching 60 percent of GDP, ten-year bond yields remain around 5.4 percent, signaling sustained market confidence. Investors appear to price in Poland’s strategic allocation of spending toward defense, infrastructure, and productive capacity, reflecting a belief that these investments will yield sufficient returns to service debt.
For Canada, the implication is that the baseline’s conservative growth assumptions—1.2–1.8 percent annually—may understate the potential upside if trade diversification, energy and critical mineral exports, and regulatory reforms succeed. This growth premium is inherently endogenous: it depends on the effectiveness of strategic policies that Jacques’s baseline treats as uncertain. If executed successfully, these investments could generate higher revenues, lower effective debt-to-GDP ratios, and maintain market confidence, mitigating the apparent fiscal risk. Conversely, if policies falter, the baseline projections remain a prudent caution.
In short, the interaction between fiscal strategy, growth outcomes, and market perception adds a layer of complexity that linear deficit projections cannot capture, highlighting the limits of status-quo baselines in periods of structural economic change.
The Political Economy of Fiscal Adjustment
Jacques’s warnings about fiscal unsustainability carry an implicit policy prescription: Canada must either raise revenues or cut spending to restore a declining debt-to-GDP trajectory. This recommendation assumes that such adjustments are both politically feasible and operationally achievable. Poland’s recent experience offers a sobering reality check.
Despite repeated warnings from Polish fiscal authorities about unsustainable deficits, planned consolidation measures for 2025 are projected to achieve savings of just 0.2 percent of GDP, down from 0.4 percent in 2024. Major adjustments have been delayed in part due to electoral considerations, while the political imperatives driving spending—defense modernization in response to regional security threats, infrastructure investment to sustain growth, and social commitments undertaken during election campaigns—show no signs of abating. In Poland, technical assessments of fiscal vulnerability have been overridden by strategic priorities and political calculus, highlighting the limits of purely technocratic prescriptions.
This pattern carries a clear warning for Canada. If a country like Poland—with a recent record of fiscal discipline, strong institutional frameworks, and an immediate security threat—cannot implement meaningful consolidation, what likelihood exists that Canada will achieve the spending restraint or revenue increases implied by Jacques’s warnings? Here, the asymmetry problem returns: Jacques’s models assume policy continuity as a baseline, yet also implicitly assume that policymakers will respond when fiscal metrics deteriorate. Both assumptions cannot simultaneously hold. Either policy is responsive—in which case baselines should integrate likely adjustments—or policy is sticky—in which case warnings about unsustainability may be technically accurate but operationally irrelevant, because the political system cannot deliver the prescribed changes.
Poland also illustrates a subtler possibility: policy may be sticky in the direction of consolidation but flexible in the direction of strategic reorientation. Warsaw delayed deficit reduction yet rapidly increased defense spending from 2 to 4.7 percent of GDP between 2021 and 2025, while maintaining elevated infrastructure investments despite mounting fiscal pressures. This reflects a deliberate prioritization of capacity-building over immediate consolidation, a strategy that markets have largely tolerated.
If Canada were to follow a similar path—resisting politically difficult spending cuts while aggressively reallocating resources toward strategic investments such as trade diversification, climate infrastructure, and enhanced defense commitments—Jacques’s baseline projections would correctly capture the trajectory of deficits and debt but would understate the potential transformation in economic capacity. The operational reality is that the political economy of adjustment is not symmetric: while fiscal retrenchment is difficult, expansion in strategically prioritized areas may be more politically and economically feasible than baseline models suggest.
In short, understanding Canada’s fiscal future requires moving beyond static arithmetic. Debt ratios and deficits are necessary metrics, but they are insufficient for assessing the strategic options available to policymakers. Comparative experience with Poland demonstrates that political constraints, strategic priorities, and market tolerance interact in complex ways, shaping what deficits can finance and how fiscal space translates into long-term economic resilience. For Canada, the lesson is clear: baseline projections of unsustainability must be interpreted through the lens of policy flexibility, strategic investment, and the political feasibility of reorientation, not merely through historical fiscal elasticities.
Behavioral Responses and the Elasticity of Adaptation
A critical limitation in Jacques’s framework concerns behavioral responses—how firms, workers, provinces, and consumers adapt to changing economic circumstances. Standard forecasting models treat these responses as relatively inelastic, relying on historical patterns. For instance, if trade with the United States declines, the model applies historical elasticities to estimate the extent to which trade with alternative partners might increase, domestic production might expand, or economic activity might simply be lost. These calibrations are grounded in past experience, a period when trade diversification was not an urgent policy priority, supply chains were optimized for a different global order, and firms faced less incentive to rapidly seek new markets.
Poland’s recent experience illustrates that such assumptions may significantly understate the speed and magnitude of adaptation when urgency and opportunity coincide. In response to the Ukraine crisis and the incentives of EU integration, Polish firms have demonstrated rapid supply chain restructuring, shifting export patterns with remarkable speed. Investment decisions that conventional models would have expected to unfold over several years occurred within months. These outcomes are not the result of intrinsic differences between Polish and Canadian firms, but rather of contextual drivers: the necessity imposed by proximity to conflict, the opportunity presented by robust EU demand, and strong policy support in the form of infrastructure investment, regulatory alignment, and trade facilitation.
For Canada, similar conditions could generate greater-than-expected elasticity. Trade urgency arising from U.S. policy uncertainty, combined with opportunity in Asian and European markets for Canadian resources and energy, alongside Carney’s proposed infrastructure and trade facilitation measures, could encourage firms to rapidly shift export focus, expand capacity for non-U.S. markets, and adopt new technologies and processes faster than historical norms would suggest. Workers might retrain and relocate more readily, and provinces could cooperate more efficiently on internal trade barriers.
While these outcomes are not guaranteed, treating them as low-probability scenarios rather than incorporating them into baseline assumptions may lead to forecasts that are systematically pessimistic. The Polish case demonstrates that when necessity, opportunity, and policy support align, behavioral responses can be highly elastic, producing economic adaptation at a speed and scale that conventional historical elasticities fail to capture. For Canada, ignoring this possibility risks underestimating the economy’s capacity to respond to structural disruptions and the potential fiscal benefits of proactive strategic investment.
Conclusion: Navigating Fiscal Risk and Strategic Opportunity
The critique of Jacques’s methodology underscores a fundamental lesson: fiscal projections are only as informative as the assumptions that underlie them. His warnings are likely correct in highlighting vulnerabilities under a status-quo baseline, yet they systematically understate the potential upside that strategic policy, market confidence, and behavioral adaptation can generate. The asymmetry between downside risk and upside potential means that technically precise forecasts may nonetheless be strategically incomplete.
Poland’s experience through September 2025 offers a nuanced template. Deficits rose sharply, political constraints limited consolidation, and fiscal fragility increased—validating Jacques’s concern for trajectory risk. Yet Poland simultaneously demonstrates that deficits, when allocated toward productivity-enhancing investment, can coexist with strong growth, manageable borrowing costs, and market confidence. The critical insight is that fiscal deterioration is not inherently catastrophic; its economic and strategic consequences depend on the composition of spending, the responsiveness of policy, and the adaptability of economic actors.
For Canada, this implies that fiscal management cannot be reduced to arithmetic. Policymakers must weigh the risk of debt accumulation against the potential for structural transformation. Methodological symmetry is required: forecasting must model upside potential with the same rigor applied to downside risk, incorporating scenarios of strategic adaptation, investment-driven growth, and elastic behavioral responses. Only by integrating these dimensions can forecasts meaningfully inform policy.
Ultimately, the coming years will be defined less by whether Canada’s fiscal position deteriorates—it almost certainly will under baseline projections—than by how that deterioration is deployed. If elevated deficits finance trade diversification, energy and infrastructure investment, and defense modernization, Canada may convert fiscal stress into long-term economic capacity and strategic resilience. Conversely, if fiscal deterioration occurs without strategic purpose, the warnings of unsustainability will manifest in a far more conventional crisis.
The path forward demands a synthesis of caution and ambition. Jacques’s projections highlight the risks; Carney’s framework emphasizes opportunity. The challenge for Canadian policymakers is to navigate the precipice with deliberate strategy, disciplined implementation, and a recognition that elevated fiscal risk can be both necessary and productive. Poland illustrates that this balance is achievable, but not automatic—it requires political will, strategic clarity, and continual adaptation. In this sense, Canada’s fiscal future is not predetermined by debt ratios or deficit percentages, but by the choices made in response to structural rupture, market signals, and the urgent need for transformation.