Die finanzpolitische Herausforderung, über die Kanadas Provinzen nicht reden wollen: Jede einzelne Provinz weist derzeit ein Defizit auf

Our country is so poorly mismanaged. It literally doesn’t even seem possible to continue under the current system. My province is flat broke and everything is fucked with no solutions in sight. And that’s the same for every province pretty much. Soon everything will be disastrous if there isn’t some kind of change to the way we do things

>Every province in Canada is now running a deficit. And there have been several credit rating downgrades in recent weeks, including to Nova Scotia, Quebec, and British Columbia.

>It’s natural to wonder if governments spend too much or tax too little. But that’s not the main problem. Our governments face a growth problem, not just a budget problem. The economy isn’t growing fast enough to support current commitments. Yet recent budgets lack bold, growth-enhancing reforms.

What follows is your bog standard „whining about productivity“ article of the sort we’ve all read endlessly for decades. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong just that yea sure we’ve heard it before, and this is an exercise using any news whatsoever to once again loop back to your favourite talking point.

What is a lot more interesting is discussing just why every single province is now in deficit all of a sudden and why we got here.

What has happened here is that Canada wide there’s been a remarkable decline in revenue growth because our biggest trading partner has become crazy. Hand in hand with that the pandemic compressed housing growth into a few years, and so we’re now experiencing the inevitable decline in demand which is depressing that industry. Finally we had a Federal government doing policy whiplash which has had severe negative impacts on Provincial governments. Federal governments increased population growth, which induced Provincial governments to do further investment, and then the Feds immediately cancelled it, leaving Provinces in the lurch. At the same time the result has been a „throwing the baby out with the bathwater“ effect by which the educational industry has imploded and resulted in tens of thousands of layoffs.

Maybe all that is cause to yea cut taxes and spur growth, but a challenging argument to reduce revenue further when all these events have imploded revenue expectations and resulted in limited fiscal capacity.

Crazy what happens when RE is such a big part of your economy and thr party slows dow.

Aside from that it goes back to basics.

Revenue vs Expenses. I know everyone doesn’t want to think of our government as a business, but at the end of the day you need to look at whats coming in and whats going out and deal with that.

Im in BC, and were projecting probably one of the worst deficits per capita in Canada. The government did a bunch of half measures and were still projecting massive debt growth – and before anyone adds trade and Trump they were still forecasting some big deficits before Trump back in 2024.

Unfortunately IMO – governments need to roll spending back and start focusing on the main areas. I know that there are lots of small spending projects which help special interest groups – but we need to get back to what really matters until we can support everything else.