There is currently no parliamentary budget officer scrutinizing federal finances in Ottawa as the interim fiscal watchdog’s term expired Monday without a successor in place.
The PBO is an independent agent of Parliament tasked with analyzing federal budgets, spending proposals and election campaign promises to raise the quality of public debate.
With no budget officer installed, the office itself cannot publish any reports or accept new work requests from parliamentarians. The budget office will continue to work on existing requests while waiting for a new officer to be named.
Interim PBO Jason Jacques was appointed to a six-month term in September that ended at 5 p.m. ET Monday.
Ottawa opened applications for a new permanent PBO in November and last week a Privy Council Office spokesman said information about the appointment of a permanent budget officer would be “made available in due course.”
The appointment of a permanent budget officer to a seven-year term is decided by cabinet and must be approved by Parliament. Interim PBOs, like Jacques, can be appointed without parliamentary sign-off for six-month terms.
The federal government’s “persistent delays” in appointing new fiscal watchdogs were highlighted as a shortcoming in an otherwise glowing review of Canada’s parliamentary budget office published last week by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Jacques argued at the House of Commons standing committee on government operations and estimates Thursday that it would benefit Ottawa to shift the watchdog’s mandate from the budget officer to the office itself to help with continuity between mandates.
Bloc Québécois MP Marie-Hélène Gaudreau told the same committee in French that the federal government’s failure to date to name a replacement PBO is “unacceptable” with Jacques’ term coming to a close.
Jacques’ tenure heading up the budget office started with a bang in September as he criticized the Liberal government’s fiscal track as “unsustainable.”
Later, when Liberals tabled their 2025 federal budget, Jacques said Ottawa’s debt path was broadly sustainable in the long term but argued the feds had used up some of their ability to absorb future fiscal shocks.
He also pushed for a new independent body to clarify definitions of capital spending under the Liberals’ new budget framework.
Just so I’m clear on all this:
- Carney has vowed to triple the military budget
- The budget bill allows cabinet ministers to exempt any entity from any law
- The feds want to pour billions into AI data centres and fossil fuel development while slashing the public sector
- Even after a 6-month period of only having an interim PBO, the Carney Liberals still haven’t appointed anyone to scrutinize the government’s finances
Stephen Harper and Pierre Polievre cut the military budget to sub-1%.
The military budget needed to be tripled. The rest is a problem. Literally nothing could be worse than Poilievre so I’ll take it, but I’m not happy about it.
A decade of falling per capita GDP and mass immigration into a housing shortage was worse.
Said like someone who never lived through the Harper regime.
I didn’t live through Harper.
^ NotGDP seemed relatively stable prior to 2008, while since Trudeau started we have been second last in the 38 countries of the OECD in per capita GDP growth. Immigration charts I’ve seen look substantially higher. Are these charts wrong?
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/can/canada/gdp-per-capita
Trudeau also had massive inflation from QE and government spending to raise GDP, and far more debt, where hamburgers now cost 21$. It seems silly to compare the two, just look at food bank usage and housing prices; how could anyone say they were comparable, unless they were a scumlord harbouring TFW in your basement profiting off what the UN called modern slavery?
Jfc. Time to block you already.
Get back to that echo chamber.
Harper took us from a budget surplus to the previously single highest deficit in history, created both the housing crisis and the TFW program Trudeau accelerated, sold our national assets to foreign owners, including China, created the Pheonix Pay crisis, gutted our national science programs, and sent our troops to fight in foreign wars while fighting to throw veterans off their medical benefits.
As bad as Trudeau was, Harper was worse, and Poilievre would make them both look like minor inconveniences. Anyone who thinks voting for a Tory is going to make things better either doesn’t understand history or is willfully ignoring it. That or they hate Canada so much they want it gone. Which are you?
Harper had rents fall relative to income. His debt was all GFC debt with an actual path to a balanced budget. He wanted to build pipelines and open up trade so that we wouldn’t be second last in per capita GDP growth with stagnant productivity.
The poor got destroyed by Trudeau, obliterated as our debt grew massively. Housing in the largest cities tripled in price as median wages barely inched up due to wage suppression. You’re either a scumlord preying on UN defined modern slavery or you enjoy schadenfreude, which is it?
You are so full of it. Median Income outpaced rent for a grand total of 6 months, he spent a decade claiming he had a path to a balanced budget and never even got close, he wanted the Americans to build pipelines, not us. You are a liar and and a traitor.
GDP-per-capita is a terrible metric in isolation. Yes, Canada had large population growth relative to it’s GDP growth over the same period, leading to lower gdp-per-capita. This is natural as immigrants will take some time to get employed, upskill, and contribute to the economy. You know what would collapse gdp-per-capita even faster? Achieving that population growth via increasing local birthrates, where instead of immigrants taking a few months to a couple years to get situated into the economy, we have children consuming resources and adding nothing at all to the GDP for ~18 years. But in either case, that population growth is good for Canada in the long term.
Failing productivity then…
still better the pp working directly with the us to destroy canada.
Well, Poilievre isn’t the PM, so maybe we need to be critical of the person actually wielding power
