Certainly, one of the things that both provincial and federal books have experienced in 2022-23 is huge increases in revenue that were completely unexpected at the start of the year. They were even completely unexpected in the spring. This is certainly happening provincially, and we will see an update of that in the federal books in the coming months when we get the fall fiscal update. It is being driven primarily by much higher than expected corporate income tax revenues, which itself is being driven by a record high corporate income tax portion of GDP, as well as record high corporate margins.
Over the course of the entirety of 2022-23, it's unlikely that this will turn the currently projected deficit into a surplus, but it is almost certainly clear the deficit will be much smaller than initially anticipated in the spring budget of 2022.
To your second point on corporate income tax avoidance, what's being measured there is the difference between the statutory rate, which is the 15% that corporations technically owe, and what they owe after a variety of tax loopholes and so on that they're taking advantage of.
One of the biggest factors in 2022-23 is going to be the carry-forward. If companies lost money in the past, they can claim that against profits in the future. If they lost money during the pandemic, in some cases they won't have to pay corporate income taxes for years, even if they are making plenty of money. This, among a variety of other corporate tax loopholes, means that companies are paying far less than the statutory rate of 15%. There's just a lot more leeway, frankly, in corporate accounting than there is on the personal side to avoid taxation.