Liberals say frequent budget updates will head off grim fiscal future

What if every season were budget season? That’s where the Holt government may be headed.

The recent suspense and controversy over what the government should spend money on — and should not spend on — could become a more frequent feature of the calendar.

“There’s nothing that stops us from finding cuts mid-year,” Finance Minister René Legacy said this week.

“It doesn’t have to be done once a year. We can certainly find more spending, so we can find more cuts.”

A provincial budget is normally an annual milestone, a government’s big moment to announce major spending decisions.

But in response to criticism that the Liberals put off difficult decisions and set the province on a track to endless deficits and higher debt, Legacy said the once-a-year routine may change.

He said his quarterly fiscal updates — on how existing spending and revenue patterns are playing out over the year — could in effect become mini-budgets to roll out new decisions.

Such mid-year fiscal updates are a feature of the federal government’s budgeting process in Ottawa but would be new in New Brunswick.

Legacy said it’s one way to avoid his own grim fiscal forecast delivered on Tuesday.

Despite Premier Susan Holt’s repeated warnings about “difficult decisions” on spending, the budget showed expenses rising by more than five per cent in the coming year.

Holt asked all departments to look at how to reduce their spending by 10 per cent, but only three of them saw their budgets reduced at all.

On that basis, the deficit will increase in the coming year, from $1.37 billion to $1.39 billion, and will barely shrink to $1.27 billion by the end of the Liberal mandate in fiscal 2028-29.

Taxpayers will spent $860 million on interest charges on the debt in the coming year, up from $542.2 million just three years earlier.

“Wall Street and the banks got a $300-million raise thanks to this premier and her government,” Progressive Conservative MLA Mary Wilson said this week.