Premier commits again to balanced budget, NDP skeptical

With the tabling of the provincial budget just over two weeks away, the premier is committing once again to a balanced budget.

“It is every intent to ensure the operations of this province are balanced, and that is absolutely the goal as we move into not just this budget coming but every budget,” said Scott Moe.

The projections in the 2018-19 budget had the government ending the fiscal year with a deficit of a few hundred million dollars and then ending 2019-20 with a slight surplus of a few million dollars.

Moe said he thinks the coming budget strikes the right balance between investing in people and infrastructure.

Ryan Meili, leader of the opposition NDP, seemed skeptical of the balanced budget claim.

“I think we’re going to see a number of these sort of ways of messing with the numbers, messing with the terminology to try to make this look like a balanced budget — but it’s not going to be balanced,” said Meili.

Meili asked about the budget during question period on Monday but said the NDP didn’t hear a lot.

“We didn’t hear any indication that they’re going to balance the budget from a numbers point of view, or from dealing with the deficits they’ve put into our schools and our hospitals, et cetera, and actually backfilling the way that they’ve cut those key services, which is very costly,” he said.

Meili said if the government ends up with a balanced budget, he’ll be pleased but shocked. He said numbers at the end of a year don’t look the same as what was predicted at the start.

“If you look back over the last number of years, you always see big increases in terms of the spending — we saw that a number of times, this year as well — and big fluctuations in the revenue,” he said.

The provincial budget will be tabled the afternoon of March 20.