Op-Eds
Canada’s fiscal situation is dire, with bloated spending, excessive borrowing and growth-stifling taxes. Canadians need a responsible federal budget — if not an A-grade fiscal plan, at least a solid B. It needs to do much better than the D we gave last fall’s fiscal statement.
Here are 10 guides we’ll be following in grading next week’s federal budget.
1. Timely release. On this one, a failing grade is already locked in. The budget arrives two weeks into the 2024-25 fiscal year for which it is supposedly the plan and six weeks after the Main Estimates. That means money is being spent without proper parliamentary scrutiny.
2. Cut the spin and give us the figures. Recent budgets have run several hundred pages, but…
The federal expenditure management system looks good on paper. Transparency is served by publication of five-year spending plans for major spending categories in the annual budget and detailed information in the government’s main estimates and departmental plans. Efficiency and effectiveness are served by setting objectives for program spending and requiring departments to report on the achievement of these objectives. This result-based management framework is buttressed by requiring most spending programs to be evaluated on a five-year cycle. Transparency is further served by making these reports publicly available.
Dig a little deeper, however, and the flaws become apparent. The first is incomplete coverage of spending.…
It’s time for the Ontario government to provide better information to the public on service improvements and cuts and when capital construction projects will be completed.
Budget day is important for the government, but more so for the citizens that the government’s choices will impact.
It’s a time when the information provided to the public, including the media, needs to be presented in a transparent and clear manner. With a finite amount of taxpayer dollars, it’s ever the more important that the public obtain comprehensive budget information to clearly understand how government spending will impact them — in health, education, the justice system and social programs — by virtue of the programming and service level choices…
Along with rampant spending, erratic tax changes, and mounting debt, the federal government is developing another bad fiscal habit: its budgets are getting later.
The government has announced that it will present its budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year, which runs from April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025, on April 16. By then, we will be more than two weeks into the fiscal year. That is too late.
The record of the Liberals under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was somewhat better before that. While only one of the four budgets they delivered from 2016-17 to 2019-20 appeared before March—and not by much: it came out on Feb. 27, 2018—none appeared after April 1. But their overall record is bad. Of the budgets they should have…
Nova Scotia’s budgets do not always make national headlines, but the one recently delivered by Minister of Finance and Treasury Board Allan MacMaster got some well-deserved attention. It indexed the province’s personal income tax to inflation. Starting next January, the thresholds for all Nova Scotia’s tax brackets and its non-refundable credits for spouses and dependents will rise with the consumer price index each year.
As Alexandre Laurin and I argued in a recent C.D. Howe Institute report, this move is long overdue. Price surges during the pandemic reminded everyone that inflation and taxes are a toxic combination. Governments that tax nominal amounts even when inflation is eroding money’s purchasing power dodge…
