Ahead of an important fiscal update this week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is demanding Prime Minister Mark Carney cap the federal deficit at $31 billion, in part by eliminating big ticket items like a major rail project and the gun buyback program.
“We should have no deficit,” Poilievre wrote in a letter to Carney. “And if I were Prime Minister right now, we would be on track to achieving that. But your Liberal government has made that impossible for this year.”
The $31 billion cap Poilievre proposes is what the former Trudeau government projected the deficit to be for the 2026-27 fiscal year when it tabled the 2024 fall economic update.
Sorry, how does one cap a deficit for an entire country? This isn’t a small business that can’t pay it’s bills. I’m no economist but I don’t think you can tell your country that they can’t afford healthcare this year because the whiner doesn’t want the bills to get bigger.
I’m also convinced that Poilievre doesn’t actually understand how a deficit works any more than my cat does.