It's Just An Economy

These is no need to follow the money at all:

After weeks of record spending, the Trudeau government is projecting a $343.2 billion deficit in the upcoming fiscal year, Finance Minister Bill Morneau said in a fiscal “snapshot” Wednesday afternoon.

Added debt will bring the net federal debt to $1.2 trillion by next March, with a projected debt-to-GDP ratio to rise to 49.1% in 2020-2021.

The deficit forecast is 10 times higher than the previous fiscal year’s deficit. Before the coronavirus pandemic, Morneau had projected a $28.1 billion deficit for this year.

Morneau did not reveal a plan to balance the budget in his update.

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(source)

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The equivalent of more than a quarter of federal employees took pandemic leave from work with pay though they weren’t sick, according to Treasury Board records. Ongoing costs total more than $439.3 million: “It’s a stunning figure.”

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Finance Minister Bill Morneau yesterday promised he would not raise taxes despite a deficit now six times the largest ever run in Canada. Extraordinary spending totaled $7.8 billion in March and $343.2 billion since April 1 for an unprecedented $351 billion deficit: “Raising taxes would be exactly the wrong response.”

But you will raise taxes, Bill. You can't borrow money and I suspect that you can't print it.

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The Liberal government is planning a massive increase to its wage subsidy program but is providing few details about how the expansion will work.

Also:

The Auditor General has alerted Parliament to a “significant deficiency” in how the National Gallery of Canada manages the conservation of its 78,000 artworks.

The National Gallery is a Crown corporation with annual expenses of about $70-million, and more than 300,000 annual visitors to its Ottawa location. ...

The failures identified by the Auditor General include “major” conservation work carried out without the approval of senior curators, and crucial research data — on artists’ techniques, materials and application, studies on conservation and deterioration — stored on paper files along with each artwork in a way that made it difficult to access.

Strategic priorities in caring for Canada’s national art collection were undocumented and unclear, the report found. Logs of service requests in the Conservation and Technical Research department were out of date, such that performance reviews amounted to little more than managers informally asking conservators to account for their work, making it hard to verify reported statistics.

“Moreover, we found instances where the movement of art in and out of the department was not properly recorded in the Corporation’s collection management system,” the report reads. “This significant deficiency matters because conservation work is vital to the Corporation’s mandate of maintaining an art collection and safeguarding its assets. Compliance with corporate policies and the implementation of well-defined procedures provide assurance that the work meets corporate expectations.”