Title was misleading, as usual, so I changed it.
Quote:
Canada’s budget gap is shrinking in line with the government’s projections, the Finance Department said Friday, while cautioning that “considerable uncertainty’’ about the strength of the global recovery means it is too early to reach conclusions about where the deficit will be at the end of the fiscal year.
Through the first three months of the year that started April 1, Canada's deficit sits at $7.2-billion, compared with $12.5-billion in the same period of 2009 when the economy was still in recession. The three-month shortfall is ``broadly consistent’’ with Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s projection that the $54-billion budget shortfall the government had at the end of the last fiscal year will shrink to just over $49-billion this year, Finance said in its monthly Fiscal Monitor.
The budget deficit for June was $2.8-billion, Finance said, compared with almost $5-billion in the same month a year earlier. The smaller discrepancy came as the government spent less on transfer payments such as employment insurance and aid that had been provided for the automotive industry during the downturn.
For the three-month period, program spending was down 5.5-per-cent on a year-over-year basis, to $54.4-billion, partly reflecting a 6.4-per-cent drop in EI transfers to jobless workers.
The government took in $54.7-billion from April through, a 3.7-per-cent increase over the same three-month period in 2009, in part because of a 54-per-cent gain in sales-tax revenues and also because of higher personal income-tax revenues. However, the government’s intake from corporate income taxes dropped by 10.5 per cent, according to the report.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repor...rticle1687627/
Good news, IMO. Tough to not run a deficit in a time of recession, but we seem to be pulling it together. Still think it should be balanced though. Hopefully we can keep this pace going forward, although with the problems the US has who knows what will happen.