I admit that the guardrail terminology was a bit of a hook. We had that terminology come and go earlier in this decade. It inspired a bit of ridicule at the time because it didn't appear that guardrails were really any kind of effective constraint against the government doing what it wanted to do on a year-by-year or every-six-months basis.
The latest fiscal update seems to confirm that the federal government, when it gets an extra revenue dollar beyond what it was expecting in its fiscal projections, immediately increases spending. The difficulty with increasing spending is that when you do it this year, the program that you increased is likely to develop a constituency and the spending will continue in years to come.
If the implicit fiscal rule is that you will spend every revenue dollar, then we are not going to get to a situation where the budget is balanced. We are not going to get to a situation where the federal government's debt is declining as a share of GDP, which it has said in the past it would like to do.
The behaviour we're seeing is not consistent with prudent fiscal policy.