Soon, the Wynne government will present its first budget since being re-elected with a majority last June. This will be a critical test, particularly with respect to the bond market and credit rating agencies.
government spending
Ontario’s net public debt is estimated at $287.3 billion and will hit nearly $320 billion by 2017. The evolution of this daunting number is an interesting story as the spring budget approaches.
The day before delivering his budget speech, Quebec Minister of Finance Carlos Leitão called the budget a “good news budget.” Indeed, Quebec’s 2015 budget continues to make progress on tackling deep-rooted fiscal problems.
With tumbling oil prices and resource revenues, Premier Jim Prentice had a choice when he delivered Alberta’s 2015 budget. He could emulate former premier Don Getty and raise taxes or follow the Ralph Klein playbook and reduce spending.
As everyone from the Manitoba-Ontario border to Tofino knows, the local and provincial economies, which depend on resource extraction, have slowed.
In a recent column about the upcoming Metro Vancouver transit plebiscite, Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Bramham complained about business leaders who talked “way more about cutting taxes for poor beleaguered taxpayers for the past 30 years than they have about the valuable services tax money provides.”
Over the past decade, the province of Alberta treated boom-time resource revenues like a permanent state of affairs. That set the province up for fiscal failure, for multiple lost opportunities.