Canadians to pay for governments' pandemic overspending with their tax dollars: report
Canada’s senior governments weren’t transparent enough about the additional $309 billion spent during the COVID-19 crisis, argues a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute, which calls for improvements to the budgeting process.
“The decisions that got made that are going to affect our future for years and decades to come, were really made on the fly without appropriate deliberation,” said Bill Robson, chief executive of the think-tank and co-author of the study, released July 11. “We need more transparency from our governments about how they’re spending our money, especially when something like COVID happens.”
Most Canadians are unaware of the scale of the debt governments amassed during the pandemic, and the fact that they’ll need to pay for them in the coming years with their taxes, Robson said.
“Here we had this major crisis. We have all these debts that are going to now have to be serviced,” he said, noting interest rates are much higher today than they were during the pandemic.
“So you got to, at some point, have a broad-based tax increase to pay for all this stuff. And we’re not hearing about that.”
It won’t be pleasant. “We have a few lean years ahead,” he added.
We have a few lean years ahead
In 2020, any member of the public who wanted to review the government budgets to see exactly how taxpayer dollars were being used would have found it difficult to do so. Some governments published budgets long after the April 1 fiscal deadline.
For example, Ontario did not produce its budget until May 2020, while Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island did not release theirs until June. Newfoundland and Labrador released theirs extremely late, in September. The federal government did not release a budget at all, the report
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