Feds refuse demands to provide fiscal update
PARTIES DEMAND PLAN TO ESCAPE FINANCIAL RUIN BUT PM SAYS IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE PREDICTIONS
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.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has supported the government with other pieces of legislation since the pandemic began, but he indicated Tuesday he could not support the fines and penalties the government had included around CERB.
“It is not right to go down a path of punishing people because they needed some help, punishing people criminally because they needed some help,” he said.
Singh said the people most likely to face the penalties were from marginalized communities who were already over represented in the justice system. He said using the tax system to reclaim the money made more sense.
Trudeau said he believed the penalties and fines would be rarely used, but they were necessary not for people who were confused about what program they were applying to, but for people who purposely set out to commit fraud.
“The vast majority of people are of good faith and just trying to support their families, trying to do the right things to get us all through this but we do need the tools to go after those who deliberately choose to take advantage of people and the system’s vulnerability at a time of crisis.”
The Liberals have said previously that they designed CERB to be a simple process with few checks to ensure people who need money would get it quickly.
Singh said he also wanted to see a plan to extend CERB because many jobs had not yet returned and people were still struggling.