Source: The Canadian Press<\/i>
Most provinces should be back in the black by 2015, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Monday after meeting with his provincial and territorial counterparts.
\u201cI think virtually all the governments would be balanced by 2015 –some earlier as a matter of fact,\u201d Flaherty told reporters in Kananaskis, Alta.
The one exception is Ontario, for which a balanced budget is \u201ca little bit further down the road,\u201d Flaherty said.
\u201cOntario took some of the hardest hits during the recession, including of course in the manufacturing sector and the automotive sector.\u201d
All the provinces agreed it was important to reduce deficits in the medium term, Flaherty said.
\u201cIt\u2019s good for Canada. It\u2019s good for confidence by investors in this country. It\u2019s good for business confidence. it\u2019s good for investment. So we\u2019re all on the same track,\u201d Flaherty said.
Flaherty confirmed Ottawa will maintain the six-per-cent annual increase to health transfers and the three-per-cent increase to social transfers in 2011-2012.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Provinces agree to reduce deficits in the medium term<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2312,2313],"tags":[2684,2628],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261969"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261969\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261969"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=261969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}