By Kate McKenna

Copyright cbc

In his first committee appearance, interim Parliamentary Budget Officer Jason Jacques told MPs his office has been consulted ahead of the fall budget but described the process as being in “early days.”

Speaking to the government operations and estimates committee on Tuesday, Jacques was asked by Conservative MP Kelly Block whether the government is currently on track to meet its “fiscal anchors.”

“I don’t know if the government currently has fiscal anchors, which of course causes the people we work with considerable concern,” said Jacques.

Former finance minister Chrystia Freeland established a suite of fiscal anchors in response to pressure from the Bank of Canada to avoid fuelling inflation with too much spending.

Jacques said the 2025 budget, when it is tabled, will give a sense of the Carney government’s financial guardrails.

He said that traditionally “all is revealed” in that several-hundred-page budget document, but the government is not yet at that stage.

“And at that point, we will have a clear sense of what precisely the fiscal anchors are,” he said.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Mark Carney appointed Jacques for six months while the government searches for a permanent replacement. The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) is an agent of Parliament, providing independent economic and financial analysis to the Senate and the House of Commons.

He takes the reins during a pivotal time for the Carney government. The finance minister announced on Tuesday that the government’s first budget will be tabled on Nov. 4.

Until Monday, ministers were telling reporters that the budget was set to be tabled in October.

The federal government hasn’t presented a budget since the spring of 2024. There was a fall economic update in December, which saw the deficit balloon to $61.9 billion.

Carney has said the deficit will be bigger than the last, citing the effect of U.S. tariffs and additional spending announced by his government.

When asked about the date being pushed back, Jacques said it risks creating more uncertainty.

“Uncertainty is always elevated in a period of low transparency,” he said. “That’s well researched and well demonstrated.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the budget will include financial guardrails.

Capital vs. operating budget

A cornerstone of Carney’s campaign was a pledge to increase investment while cutting operational costs.

To that end, the Liberal platform includes a commitment to separate capital and operating spending. It also included a commitment to support that move with a change in legislation and new powers and resources for the PBO.

The platform said this would be an exercise in transparency that is “consistent with the public finance practices of other advanced economies such as the United Kingdom.”

Jacques said he has met with Finance Department officials, with the focus of the meeting around their ideas to break up capital and operating budgets, and how both would be defined.

He said the department is in the middle of consultations and was still in “relatively early days.”