Jim Flaherty: Federal Deficit

Finance Minister Dept: These are all worthy suggestions, but what will be noticed about all of them is that they amount to undoing the damage done in Flaherty first seven budgets. It was Flaherty, after all, who first handed the training envelope over to the provinces in the 2007 budget, with results that have evidently been unsatisfactory. It was under Flaherty that the federal payroll ballooned to a record 380,000 employees nearly a third higher than in 2000 as it was Flaherty who tarted up an already complex tax code with all sorts of frilly tax credits, for children fitness and the like. The finance minister will wish to be congratulated for balancing the budget sometime in the next two years, but it was this finance minister who plunged us so far into deficit, needlessly, in the first place, according to Montreal Gazette. Certainly the federal deficit, about which you will hear a great deal in coming days, is the least of our problems. A bit of mild restraint and modest growth in revenues have already cut it to a projected $26 billion for the fiscal year just ending, itself almost certainly an overstatement it was just $13 billion over the first nine months of the fiscal year . Even a slowing economy and falling commodity prices are unlikely to throw the government much off track. While Thursday statement will probably stick to the government latest target of a balanced budget by 2015-16, the C.D. Howe Institute calculates, in its annual Shadow Budget, that it could be done a year ahead of schedule, by means of cuts in program spending totalling roughly 3 on the dollar and As he approaches his eighth and possibly final budget, Jim Flaherty will no doubt be thinking about his legacy, the last acts that will shape how he ll be remembered. The air is thick with leaks, speculation and flat-out guesses of what he might have in mind: from reclaiming federal funds for job training from the provinces, to sweeping tax reform, to more prosaic measures like trimming the federal public service. But never mind. Historically, for a minister merely to leave the nation finances in no worse shape than he found them the debt-to-GDP ratio will come in this fiscal year, on current projections, at almost exactly the same level as it was in Flaherty first year would count as something of a legacy. If he really wants to do something historic, however, he ll be thinking less about collecting plaudits in the short term and more about addressing the longer-term challenges facing the country, notably sorry to beat this drum again, but yes the aging population. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.