Liberal budget needs restraint on deficit

‘How low can you go?” apparently isn’t something you sing while dancing the limbo to Chubby Checker. It seems to be the unofficial theme song for federal Liberal budgeting.

This much was clear after watching Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau unveil increasingly deeper deficits last year.

The Liberals campaigned on what they called “modest” deficits during the 2015 election campaign. They’d clock in at no more than $10 billion, the Liberals said. It was supposed to be the ceiling.

But last spring they blew that number out of the water, with a budget pegging the red ink spilling out $29.4 billion.

That’s not what Canadians signed up for and opinion polls showed they weren’t impressed.

Call us chronically naive, but we’ve got our fingers crossed they’ll exercise better restraint this time around.

If the Liberals want to send a signal to Canadians they’re taking our finances seriously, the budget Morneau is expected to reveal in the coming weeks needs to roll back the coming deficit from previous projections.

Last November, during the fall economic update, Morneau predicted the coming budget would have a deficit of $26.9 billion.

This is a slight improvement over the $29 billion he’d projected in the previous budget. But make no mistake: it’s still a broken election pledge.

The promise of running no more than $10 billion into the red was to cover the first three years of Trudeau’s government.

Canadians are increasingly wary of Trudeau’s fiscal competence. They were shocked to learn about a buried government report from the Department of Finance that warned about major fiscal troubles on the horizon. We’re on track to hit $1 trillion in debt in the next 15 years and are expected to run deficits until the 2050s, the report showed.

We are recklessly saddling future generations with crushing debt.

Clearly the solution is to chart a new path as soon as possible — as in now.

If Morneau comes even close to hitting that $29-billion deficit mark, it’ll be proof that the Liberals don’t take fiscal stability seriously.

The public’s trust in the ability of this Liberal government to manage our finances will erode even further.

The Liberals need to show restraint and they need to do it now.