Carney raised expectations of a well-being economy. His budget told a different story

Mark Carney’s political rise was closely watched by advocates who believed he would reorient Canada’s economy around health and well-being. To them, the 2025 budget came as a major disappointment.

The well-known economist had served as the United Nations’ Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance in 2020. In his 2022 book Values, he argued that economies should be reoriented to serve public well-being rather than market forces.

But advocates for a well-being economy, an international movement pushing for economic reforms that prioritize human and environmental health, say their high hopes for Carney have since been dashed.

The budget was "spectacularly disappointing for its failure to meet the moment," said Dr. Lindsay McLaren, a community health sciences professor at the University of Calgary and researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Simon Ticehurst, advocacy lead with the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, said tariff threats from Trump have given the government political cover "to implement a conservative, regressive budget."

Carney’s first budget is an abrupt departure from a Trudeau-era focus on social and health supports. The government’s Build Canada Strong plan frames the pivot as a response to global tensions, national defence needs, and the accelerating clean energy transition.  

In keeping with Carney’s pre-campaign statements, the government frames climate change as an economic threat. The budget introduced the Climate Competitiveness Strategy, aiming to lower emissions from industry not via regulation, but through investments and corporate subsidies to promote innovations in de-carbonization and clean energy tech. 

The approach of investment-as-intervention aligns with the government’s stated priorities of boosting Canada’s economic productivity and resilience.

McLaren said the budget’s new focus on investment fails to address urgent threats to public health and well-being, including widening health and social inequalities, the climate emergency, and increasing outbreaks of disease. 

She said the federal budget "is not engaging with these problems in any meaningful way."

Dr. Melissa Lem, a clinical assistant professor in the University of British Columbia’s faculty of medicine and past president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), said public policy shapes the social determinants of health, which account for the majority of everyday health outcomes. 

"Air pollution is minimized, our food supply is uncontaminated and we're able to access timely and expert care for medical issues," she wrote in an email. "Not many of us think about that on a daily basis."

Dr. Joe Vipond, emergency physician and also a former president of CAPE, said he sees in his patients the effects of policies that prioritize constant economic growth. 

“The vast majority of the time when I'm dealing with somebody with mental health issues, there's an element of financial stress,” he said.

While Carney’s budget claims to lower costs for Canadians, it also marks a move toward a “more extractive economic model,” said Melissa Gorrie, law reform manager with Ecojustice. 

Key commitments under the Building Canada Act, included launching the Major Projects Office as a means to get nation-building projects off the ground faster. The first expedited projects will increase the production of liquefied natural gas and the mining of natural resources on Treaty territories. 

Lem pointed to research showing that communities living near fracking sites have higher rates of cancer, heart disease, lung disease, birth defects and premature death. The health impacts on these communities are compounded by severe shortages of doctors. 

"I've personally spoken with doctors who moved away from northeast B.C., the epicentre of fracking on the west coast, to protect their families from the high rates of disease they've observed there," she said.

Gorrie is concerned about the Carney government’s plan to weaken greenwashing legislation, which was passed in June 2024 to penalize false corporate claims of environmental benefit. 

Lem compared this to the control of health misinformation around smoking. "Just like tobacco advertising bans, we need strong legislation to clean up advertising in Canada to prevent us from making unhealthy decisions around fossil fuels."

In 2022, Canada became one of six Western countries to announce its commitment to build a well-being economy. The year before, the federal budget set up a framework to include quality-of-life measurements in decision-making and budgeting.

These were "seeds to work with," said McLaren. "When you think about it, it's literally the government's job to protect and support our well-being."

Ashley Aimone is a global health researcher and planetary health educator at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto.