{"id":385009,"date":"2025-11-17T10:43:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T10:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/385009\/"},"modified":"2025-11-17T10:43:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T10:43:10","slug":"ottawas-operating-spending-not-capital-driving-deeper-deficits-pbo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/385009\/","title":{"rendered":"Ottawa’s operating spending \u2014 not capital \u2014 driving deeper deficits: PBO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted on November 17, 2025<\/p>\n

By\u00a0Craig Lord\u00a0in Ottawa<\/p>\n

\"\"The parliamentary budget officer projects Ottawa will blow past the new fiscal anchors set out in last week’s 2025 federal budget.<\/p>\n

Interim budget officer Jason Jacques says in a new analysis of the budget that Ottawa is set to run an average deficit of $64.3 billion over the next five years \u2014 double the level set out in the federal government’s last fiscal update in late 2024.<\/p>\n

Despite Prime Minister Mark Carney’s talk of shifting government spending to capital investment rather than operating costs, Jacques says the deeper deficits are being driven by new day-to-day program spending.<\/p>\n

The federal Liberals set fiscal anchors \u2014 benchmarks to show prudent financial management \u2014 to balance the operating side of the budget in three years and maintain a declining deficit-to-GDP ratio over the planning horizon.<\/p>\n

Jacques says Ottawa is using overly expansive definitions of capital spending and predicts new spending plans will leave the government with an operating deficit.<\/p>\n

The PBO’s analysis of the budget’s outlook also projects it’s not likely the government will meet its goal of shrinking the deficit as a share of GDP.<\/p>\n

(C) The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Posted on November 17, 2025 By\u00a0Craig Lord\u00a0in Ottawa The parliamentary budget officer projects Ottawa will blow past the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":385010,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[64,79,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-385009","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115564630150002279","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}