Freeland has more room to spend in April budget thanks to higher oil
BNN Bloomberg
Surging commodity prices are giving Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland breathing room to deliver on spending demands in next month’s budget without pushing Canada off a trajectory that will nearly balance the books in five years.
Surging commodity prices are giving Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland breathing room to deliver on spending demands in next month’s budget without pushing Canada off a trajectory that will nearly balance the books in five years.
The government is set for an even bigger revenue windfall than it projected in December, economists say, as higher energy prices boost corporate taxes and fuel incomes in the world’s fourth-largest producer of oil.
Revenue could surpass projections by as much as $30 billion (US$23.6 billion) over the next two years, though the governing Liberals are likely to book a more conservative amount given extreme levels of uncertainty and volatility as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Still, the better-than-expected fiscal picture allows Freeland to deliver on campaign promises from last year’s election, along with new measures to spur growth and innovation, without fueling deficits that could stoke inflation that’s already at a three-decade high.
“This is the budget where they roll out their remaining platform pledges,” Rebekah Young, an economist at Bank of Nova Scotia, said by phone. Still, “the path for the deficit and the path for the debt will look pretty much like it did in the December update” because of higher revenue.
Freeland’s most-recent projections saw the deficit shrinking to $13 billion by 2026 after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government ran budget gaps of nearly half a trillion Canadian dollars between 2020 and 2022 -- smashing post-World War II records.
