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Liberal fiscal plans less transparent than under Harper, Kevin Page says
Kevin Page, Canada’s former parliamentary budget officer, says the Liberal government is even less transparent on fiscal matters than their Conservative predecessors. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)
Canada’s former parliamentary budget officer says the Liberal government is even less transparent on fiscal matters than the Conservative government it succeeded.
“I don’t think it is [more transparent]. The documents — they’re not better from a government that promised to be better, more transparent … there’s no more information, perhaps even less information, than what we got from the previous government,” Kevin Page said said in an interview CBC Radio’s The House.
“I don’t think we’ve seen the transparency yet,” he said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigned on a pledge to run three “modest” deficits of no more than $10 billion a year. But Finance Minister Bill Morneau released his second fiscal update this week ahead of the March 22 federal budget, and his figures show it will be much higher than that.
The deficit will balloon to $18.4 billion in 2016-17 and $15.5 billion in 2017-18 — and that is before any new spending Morneau outlines in the March budget. Those numbers are drastically different from the $3.9-billion and $2.4-billion shortfalls forecast just three months ago.
“A less ambitious government might see these conditions as a reason to hide, to make cuts or to be overly cautious. But our government might see that the economic downturn makes our plan to grow the economy even more relevant than it was a few short months ago,” Morneau said Monday.
Page, who frequently squared off with the previous Conservative government over their fiscal secrecy, says his concerns about transparency stem from a lack clarity around the deficit figure.
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Canada’s technical recession ‘contained,’ says former PBO Kevin Page
Ex-parliamentary budget officer says there is ‘still lots of growth in the service sector’
Although Canada is in a likely technical recession — defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth — it’s a recession that is contained, says former budget watchdog Kevin Page.
“In the current context, if you look at the growth numbers, the recession is effectively in the goods sector, it’s in the oil industry, it’s weak growth in manufacturing, weak growth in construction,” said Page in an interview on CBC Radio’s The House.
“It’s quite contained. There’s still lots of growth in the service sector.”
But Page, who served as Canada’s first parliamentary budget officer from 2008-2013, cautioned against reading too much optimism into the numbers.
The Canadian economy lost 6,400 jobs in June as gains in full-time work were offset by losses of part-time jobs, according to Statistics Canada.
The jobless rate stayed steady at 6.8 per cent, the same level it has been at since February. It was a better showing than what a consensus of economists were expecting, which was a loss of about 10,000 positions, but Page said the pattern remains one of shrinking growth.
“For the second quarter we had net job creation of more than 30,000, but if you look at the trend in June we actually declined,” he said.
“So if you look at the job picture, it’s gotten progressively weaker through the summer. I think that would be a concern for the government and a concern for the overall strength of our economy.”
“The economy’s weak, you can’t deny that. It will be pretty hard for Minister [of Finance Joe] Oliver to keep that line that we’re not in a technical recession,” Page added.
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