The Bolt

I went over to the Department of Finance's web site and looked for two things:
- the budget that the federal Conservatives laid out for 2009-2010
- the year-to-date actual numbers for revenues and expenses

If I weren't determined I don't know that I would find these things. Again I tried to follow some old links that I had bookmarked, and again the URLs have changed and the links were broken. I'm getting more convinced this is on purpose. Anyway, here is what I found. First, they budgeted for an increase of program expenses of $13 Billion compared to last fiscal year:

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Source: Budget 2009 Fiscal Outlook

But actual program expenses for the first 5 months of fiscal year alone (April 2009 - August 2009) have already gone up $14.1 Billion compared to this period last year:

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Source: The Fiscal Monitor (edited)

That's the first half of the equation. Now on to revenues. First, here is what the government projected for revenue in this fiscal year - a very small decrease of only $0.3 Billion compared to last fiscal year:

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Source: Budget 2009 Fiscal Outlook (edited)

However, the actual numbers to date for revenue show a real loss of $10.6 Billion.

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Source: The Fiscal Monitor (edited)

The fact that federal government revenues are down and expenses are up won't come as a surprise to most Canadians because they understand two simple concepts:
(1) as people lose their jobs, they stop paying income tax; and
(2) as people lose their jobs, they start collecting employment insurance
So the government loses revenue at the same time as they incur more expenses every time someone in Canada loses their job (and is eligible for EI).

The unknown here, and at time of budgeting months ago, is exactly how many people in Canada would be moving from "employed" to "unemployed" in 2009. I don't expect the Minister of Finance or any of his crew to have known this exactly. But they should have at least a good guess, a guess that is in the ballpark and reasonable to use for budgeting purposes. They are being paid to have better guesses than you or me (they call it analysis, I know, but it's little more than educated guessing as you can see).

Let's summarize this all in a table:

From the table above, it looks to me that by the end of this fiscal year we will be adding around $59 Billion to the federal debt, not the $13.3 Billion that the government told us we would be adding. Ouch. This is fiscally irresponsible. I'm not saying that we should be trying to pay down our debt during this recession, but I was truthfully hoping for a balanced budget. I always hope for at least a balanced budget, but it looks like I'm going to continue to be disappointed for the next few years, perhaps the next decade.

The audited financial statements for last fiscal year have finally been published, and without going into them in full detail here, it turns out that the federal Conservatives also did a bad job of budgeting last year. No surprise there.

If I were in charge of the federal budget I would certainly do things differently, but then I'd probably also not last long in government. Perhaps we need a new reality TV show where people get voted off the island for making decisions that keep them elected but that are bad for the country.