Carney's fiscal update plays a charming tune, but falls off at the end

I was standing in the Cathédrale Saint-Vincent in St. Malo, France, with my 82-year-old French mother and sister on the day the federal government’s spring economic update was released. The plaque over the tomb of Jacques Cartier there, in translation, reads: “Here rests Jacques Cartier, native of Saint-Malo and the first discoverer of Canada, who died in 1557.”

It was a moving moment. Cartier was an explorer who took genuine risk, with no certainty of return, to ch...