EDITORIAL: Trudeau by the numbers: It’s bad
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With 96 days to go until the Oct. 21 federal election, Canadians would be wise to disbelieve anything Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tells them about the state of federal finances going forward.
That’s because of what he said in the lead-up to the Oct. 19, 2015 election that brought him to power.
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Back then he said under his leadership the federal government would record three years of modest deficits, followed by a $1-billion surplus in the current fiscal year, 2019-20.
“I am looking straight at Canadians and being honest the way I always have,” Trudeau said. “We’ve said we are committed to balanced budgets and we are. We will balance that budget in 2019.”
Now let’s consider what happened.
Trudeau said in 2015 if he was elected, his government would have a $9.9-billion deficit in the 2016-17 fiscal year, $9.5 billion in 2017-18, $5.7 billion in 2018-19 and a $1-billion surplus in the current fiscal year.
What Trudeau delivered was a $19-billion deficit in 2016-17, $19 billion in 2017-18, $14.9 billion in 2018-19 and a $19.8-billion deficit in the current fiscal year, when he said he’d have a $1-billion surplus.
While these budgets all contained a $3-billion reserve fund (meaning they would be $3 billion a year lower if Trudeau didn’t spend the reserve), in his latest budget Trudeau predicts deficits of $19.7 billion in 2020-21, $14.8 billion in 2021-22, $12.1 billion in 2022-23 and $9.8 billion in 2023-24, with no end of deficits in sight.
During the 2015 election, then Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper mocked Trudeau’s predictions as absurd given the cost of his election promises, telling a rally in Hamilton, while pinching his figures together: “(Trudeau) says a modest deficit, a tiny deficit, so small you can barely see the deficit. Three modest little deficits … We’ve gone through this before — look at the mess in Ontario with the modest deficits of the Liberal government. I guess it turns out the budget doesn’t balance itself after all.”
No, it doesn’t, as Canadians have learned the hard way.
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