In the past weeks, Canada’s economy has begun to reopen. This restart is tentative and faces great uncertainty. Nonetheless, Canada’s governments must now turn to planning for our economic recovery. The recovery plans should focus on laying foundations for Canadian prosperity in decades to come. Well-targeted infrastructure investments should be the centrepiece.
Notwithstanding the risk of a second wave for the pandemic, all indications are for a long, hard recovery rather than any “V-shaped” bounceback. Canada’s economy will likely face a period of weak demand from consumers and for our major exports, as well as depressed capital spending by private business.
Managing the crisis required unprecedented outlays by the…
COVID-19 is hurting more than our health. It has crushed our economy. And it is straining our governing institutions. A case in point is the federal government’s refusal to table a budget.
The C.D. Howe Institute publishes an annual report on the fiscal accountability of Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial governments. Transparency about taxing, spending and borrowing is fundamental to representative government. Budget votes determine whether governments stand or fall. Legislatures must authorize spending through the estimates process. They need timely, full information to do their work.
The fiscal years of Canada’s senior governments run from April 1 to March 31. Governments that present budgets and…
Parliament is being asked to authorize massive amounts of spending to mitigate the economic damage of COVID-19. To best represent the interests of Canadian taxpayers, who some day will foot the bill, parliamentarians need the best picture possible of the underlying context. That should include a fiscal update.
The Prime Minister rejected the idea of a fiscal update last week, arguing that “in this situation any prediction we make will be widely unreliable from one week to the next.”
Many past updates and budgets, vital to the parliamentary process, would have failed the reliability test.
The infamous 1995 budget, widely viewed as tackling a fiscal crisis and putting the country on a sustainable fiscal path,…
