PBO: 10 per cent chance of Tories Eliminating Deficit in Time

Count Kevin Page among the critics who don't think much of Stephen Harper's election promise to slay the deficit by 2014-15.

Kevin Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, has released his projections on the Conservative government's timeline for eliminating the deficit, and gave the Tories one-in-10 odds of meeting that goal by 2014-15. A key plank in the Tories' re-election campaign was to get rid of the deficit by 2014-15, but Page said at this rate, we'll likely still be $18.7 billion in the red by that year, then $13.1 billion in 2015-16, and $7.3 billion in 2016-17. The projection has been revised downward since the spring, with Page's office now expecting the country's gross domestic product to only grow by 2.2 per cent this year instead of the earlier, rosier 2.9 per cent. So we can hope to be deficit-free by 2017-18, or gamble on that one-in-10 chance that the economy will rebound enough to generate the necessary revenue to put the country back into the black. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is scheduled to table his own economic forecast this month, but has so far declined to say that the deficit will be gone by the time the Tories are up for re-election in 2015.