The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) says many members of his team are concerned by the federal government’s apparent absence of fiscal anchors to rein in spending.
“I don’t know that the government currently has fiscal anchors, which, of course, causes the people that I work with a considerable degree of concern at this point,” interim PBO Jason Jacques told the government operations committee on Sept. 16.
Jacques said the previous Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had the anchors of keeping Canada’s annual deficit at 1 percent of GDP, as well as maintaining a declining debt-to-GDP ratio.
“It’s unclear where those stand,” he told MPs during his testimony. “They haven’t been reiterated by the current government, to my knowledge.”…