That comes from my experience as a macroeconomics policy analyst over the last decades. I have, many times, seen finance ministers practice and perfect the art of under-promising and over-delivering, in terms of setting forecasts that are deliberately pessimistic so that, at the end of the day, they can stand up and say, “Look, prudent fiscal management has allowed us to get to this happy point.”
That was obviously about to happen last year. If you look at the fiscal monetary reports, the federal government actually ran a surplus over the first 11 of 12 months in the last fiscal year, equal to $3 billion. Then, suddenly, in the last month of the year, the government made some announcements, many of which were very important. These were prefunding health care transfers to the provinces—and so on—that got the budget back into deficit in the last month of the year.
Clearly, there's some theatre, if you like, baked into budgets. This has been true of governments of any political stripe over the last quarter-century.