OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is ruling out providing a fiscal update on the nation’s finances despite demands from opposition parties.
Trudeau said his government has been fully transparent about its spending on the pandemic, but providing a fiscal update would require a crystal ball on where the economy is headed.
“A core part of that is predicting what things are going to look like for the rest of the year and for the coming years. In this situation any prediction we make will be widely unreliable from one week to the next,” he said.
With so much of the Canadian economy essentially “frozen or in a coma”, it was impossible to predict what would happen when things restart, said Trudeau.
The Bloc Québécois has made a fiscal update a part of its conditions for supporting legislation expected to be introduced Wednesday to amend the Canada Emergency Response Benefit program and bring in fines for people who fraudulently used it.
Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre said a fiscal update was a necessity to understand where the country sits after billions in spending.
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