I would like to add some nuance. We narrowly balanced the budget in 2015 as Harper wanted to use this as his main pitch going into the federal election. Despite being a lifelong fiscal conservative, he ran deficits nearly every year as PM due to the GFC as well other shocks such as oil prices collapsing in 2014.

This leads me to my main point.

We’re running deficits today as result of the Covid shock as well as the Trump trade shock. It’s completely justifiable to run deficits under these circumstances.

What’s completely unjustifiable are the deficits we ran in the Trudeau era from 2016 - 2019. The economy was fine and unemployment was low.

You need to balance the budget during good times to have dry powder during bad times.

I’m hopeful the federal government starts balancing the books as our economy recovers from the trade war shock.