January 2011
November 2010 Fiscal Monitor Indicates Deficit for 2010-11 to be $7 billion Lower than Forecast
The November 2010 Fiscal Monitor shows that the deficit for the first eight months of 2010-11 was $26.0 billion, $10.3 billion lower than reported in the same period last year. The improvement to date is about equal to that expected in the October 2010 Update for the year as a whole ($10.2 billion).
Read MoreTo: Minister of Finance The Honourable J. Flaherty: Pre-Budget 2011 Submission: Confronting the Structural Deficit
Main Message
The federal government is not confronted with a short-term fiscal crisis but it is facing a stubborn medium-term structural deficit that will prevent you from balancing the budget by 2015-16, without new expenditure cuts and/or tax increases.
Read MoreProof is not in the numbers for Flaherty’s corporate tax cuts
In an article in the Globe and Mail on January 5, columnist Neil Reynolds argued that the federal Finance Minister’s corporate tax cuts from 19.5% in 2008 to 19.0% in 2009, 18.0% in 2010 and to 16.5% in 2011 “are already paying off”. However, the facts quoted in the article do not support his claim.
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