Canadian Federal budget once again a progressive document

I haven‘t yet fully read and digested the latest Canadian  Federal budget but so far I find it to be a realistic and progressive assessment of the likely course of the Canadian economy over the next year. Unemployment although at its lowest point in four decades could still be lowered further and may well be, provided the trade disturbances on a global scale do not spread and undermine economic growth. This is equally true of the Bank of Canada. Given the low petroleum prices and overall inflation low at 1.9 % there is absolutely no reason for the Bank to raise interest rates and thereby prevent unemployment from falling lower.Currently unemployment is 5.8%.The private sector banks and financial houses project unemployment to rise to 6 % the budget projects 5.9 %. The federal  debt to GDP ratio, the only sensible measure of debt burden is low, stable at roughly 30.8 % and slowly falling over the next three years projected to fall to 29.3 % by 2022. The government proposes a. number of detailed progressive expenditures on seniors, millennials ,indigenous peoples, infrastructure and social policy generally and I will comment on these in further posts after I have finished reading the budget papers.

Advertisement

About haroldchorneyeconomist

I am Professor of political economy at Concordia university in Montréal, Québec, Canada. I received my B.A.Hons (econ.&poli sci) from the University of Manitoba. I also completed my M.A. degree in economics there. Went on to spend two years at the London School of Economics as a Ph.D. student in economics and then completed my Ph.D. in political economy at the University of Toronto. Was named a John W.Dafoe fellow, a CMHC fellow and a Canada Council fellow. I also was named a Woodrow Wilson fellow in 1968 after completing my first class honours undergraduate degree. Worked as an economist in the area of education, labour economics and as the senior economist with the Manitoba Housing and Renewal Corporation for the Government of Manitoba from 1972 to 1978. I also have worked as an economic consultant for MDT socio-economic consultants and have been consulted on urban planning, health policy, linguistic duality and public sector finance questions by the governments of Manitoba, Saskatchewan,the cities of Regina and Saskatoon, Ontario and the Federal government of Canada. I have also been consulted by senior leaders of the British Labour party, MPs from the Progressive Conservative party, the Liberal party and the New Democrats on economic policy questions. Members of the Government of France under the Presidency of Francois Mitterand discussed my work on public sector deficits. I have also run for elected office at the municipal level. I first began to write about quantitative easing as a useful policy option during the early 1980s.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s