Revenue looking lower for Ontario

Finance Minister Charles Sousa says the slow growth of the economy means provincial revenue is significantly lower than forecast in last year’s budget. Sousa says the provincial deficit is 11.3 billion, which is 400-million dollars less than the forecast: “We are going to continue to invest in infrastructure and continue to invest in skills and training and we are going to maintain a very dynamic climate to attract more business investors to do business here in Ontario. And in the result of that we may not meet our short term target but we have a number of initiatives that we are going to bring out in the budget that will display and highlight how and why we will in fact balance the budget by 2017-18.”

Vic Fedeli: “This is a complete fiction. The minister’s assertion he can balance the budget by 2018 while admitting larger defecits, pure fiction.”

Wednesday, the finance minister released a report that said Ontario’s economic growth would lag behind the rest of the country over the next 20 years.