On March 22, 2017, the federal budget entitled: Building A Strong Middle Class was presented by Finance Minister Bill Morneau. Innovation was the theme of the day, with key focus on infrastructure, housing strategy, skills, health, and gender balance.
As expected, the budget posts a significant deficit of $28.5 billion, expected to peak this year, and with the debt-to-GDP ratio to peak in the next 2 years at 36.1% of GDP before slowly decreasing starting in fiscal year 2019 – 2020.
This year was very much a ‘Stay the course’ budget with very few major changes of policy direction. In fact, the anticipated large-scale tax measures were nowhere to be found. There were also no changes to small business tax from the pre-budget framework. There were also small tweaks to corporate tax; mostly technical in nature.