Don’t expect fiscal update anytime soon: Trudeau

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is ruling out providing a fiscal update on the nation’s finances despite demands from opposition parties.

Trudeau said his government has been fully transparent about its spending on the pandemic, but providing a fiscal update would require a crystal ball on where the economy is headed.

“A core part of that is predicting what things are going to look like for the rest of the year and for the coming years. In this situation any prediction we make will be widely unreliable from one week to the next,” he said.

With so much of the Canadian economy essentially “frozen or in a coma”, it was impossible to predict what would happen when things restart, said Trudeau.The Bloc Québécois has made a fiscal update a part of its conditions for supporting legislation expected to be introduced Wednesday to amend the Canada Emergency Response Benefit program and bring in fines for people who fraudulently used it.

Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre said a fiscal update was a necessity to understand where the country sits after billions in spending.

“We need an economic update to ascertain how broke we are and to hear the government’s plan to escape financial ruin.”

Poilievre also called on the government to provide more funding to the auditor general so she can better probe the government’s financial choices.

The Liberals initially proposed they would reveal a budget in late March, but COVID-19 derailed those plans and Trudeau said the government currently has no plans for either a budget or a fiscal update.

Last month, the parliamentary budget officer projected this year’s deficit could be as much as $260 billion.

Next week, the government will ask parliament to approve $87 billion in new spending during one session. Trudeau said he was confident the country could handle the huge surge in COVID-19 spending.

“Canada went into this crisis with a far better fiscal position than just about any other G7 country and we are coming through it extremely well,” he said. “The investments we’re making that will allow Canada to bounce back strongly from this are the kinds of things we needed to do during this pandemic.”

Under the proposed new legislation, someone would be ineligible for the CERB benefit if they refuse a reasonable offer of work. It also creates fines for people caught fraudulently using the system up to $5,000 in addition to having to repay twice the amount they fraudulently took. The legislation also allows for short jail sentences for fraudsters.

The government could pass the legislation with the support of just one opposition party, but it would need unanimous support to fasttrack the bill.