Grading Chrystia Freeland’s budget: Some passes, many question marks
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s first postpandemic budget had four big tasks.
The good news is that, as Ms. Freeland put it, the economy is booming. Canada has regained 112 per cent of the jobs lost during the pandemic, and unemployment is below where it was in early 2020. Better would have been to put fiscal and monetary policy on the same anti-inflation page, via a smaller deficit. That could happen through any combination of spending cuts or tax increases; what’s inflationary is not the level of government spending per se, but the economic stimulus that comes from pulling future spending into the present, via deficits.
The budget does include new measures to stimulate the building of more and denser housing. But Ms. Freeland is also doubling the first-time home buyer’s tax credit, to $1,500, and creating a new tax shelter called the “Tax-Free First Homes Savings Account.” These will use taxpayer dollars to juice housing inflation. The only saving grace is that these programs are not that big: a mere $1.4-billion over five years.
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