Reevely: Ontario's deficit is $1.3B lower than forecast (sort of)

A big part of explaining why economic growth, and sales tax revenue, were lower than expected?
"Having successfully not spent the money he didn’t plan to spend, he’s now treating that $1 billion as a sign of the Liberal government’s gift for fiscal restraint.

It’s an old trick. When the federal Liberals were enjoying budget surpluses in the early 2000s, they’d build in multibillion-dollar contingency funds to make the surpluses seem smaller. At the end of the year, they could overspend on some new goodies and still come in with better numbers than had been “predicted” when the contingency funds weren’t all spent.

Of course, put the $1 billion aside and the government is still $300 million better off than its projections said it would be."
...The province did pull in $858 million more than anticipated from its Crown corporations. That’s a significant amount of money. Unfortunately, most of that came from Ontario Power Generation and Hydro One."

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