Kevin Page
The former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page has told CBC Radio that the new Liberal finance minister, Bill Morneau (Toronto Centre) is even less transparent on fiscal matters than the Conservative government which preceded the Trudeau majority. Page contradicted the host of the program saying: “I don’t think it is [more transparent]. The documents — they’re not better from a government that promised to be better, more transparent … there’s no more information, perhaps even less information, than what we got from the previous government,” Page said in an interview CBC Radio’s The House. “I don’t think we’ve seen the transparency yet,” he said. Page was a sharp critic of the Conservatives during his time as a spending watchdog. He frequently said the Tory policy lacked clarity around the deficit figure.
$40 MILLION FUDGE FACTOR
Page told The House that the government took the private sector forecast for Canada’s economy in the next fiscal year and then cut an extra $40 billion from the projected growth, something he calls a fiscal “fudge factor.” “It just wasn’t explained. This is a government that wants to be more transparent, more analytical, more evidence-based and he (Morneau) missed an important opportunity to explain to people why the outlook is changing. And I think we’re going to hear, in a few weeks, that they want a big stimulus package,” Page said. Page also said that Mr. Morneau should have released fiscal targets to put Canadians at ease. “We shouldn’t give an unlimited leash to the finance minister. I think that’s never a good idea. I think he missed an opportunity this week to say ‘Yeah the situation has deteriorated … but we’ll not allow the deficit to go above $30 billion, we’ll get back to balance somewhere over the medium term,’ Mr.Page told the radio program.
