Flaherty Takes Back His Projection to Balance Books by 2015

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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Continues assurances about Canada getting back on its feet by 2015 have all failed on Tuesday. The Finance Minister of Canada, Jim Flaherty, was speaking in Fredericton, N.B., on Tuesday when he confessed that the government will fail to meet its goal of balancing the books till 2015. In fact he claimed that now it will take until 2016-17, i.e. a year later than what was promised for the past three years.

Flaherty went on stating that Canada will be seeing increase in deficits of about $20.4 billion within the coming four years due to the forced upward by shrinking revenues in the face of global economic weakness. Flaherty attributed that “Canada has clearly been affected by volatile and falling world commodity prices since the budget in late March.”

As earlier as eight months ago, Flaherty was predicting that government will be able to bring balance in Ottawa’s finance and economy until 2015-16. Conversely, today Flaherty blamed the latest economic figures as he announced that this year will see an average of $7.2 billion a year less in revenues than he predicted in the coming four years. This also implies that this year’s deficit of federal government will be $26 billion, i.e. $5 billion more than the estimation of Flaherty for the 2012-13 budgets last spring. Gradually increasing in the coming years, the once-projected surplus of $3.4 billion in 2015-16 budgets is now projected to be a deficit of $1.8 billion.