Could do better

The overall grade for each province is an average of three subgrades: Grade I, which measures the province’s fiscal health before the tabling of the fiscal year 2004/05 budget in spring 2004; Grade II, which reflects the accuracy of the 2003/04 budget compared with data from the independent Dominion Bond Rating Service and the revised data in the 2004/05 budget; and Grade III, which grades the 200 [...] Using this methodology, the ten-province Canadian average grade is C+, while the Atlantic provinces collectively earn a slightly below average C. Individually, New Brunswick’s C+ is the highest of the four provinces, a reflection of the good state of its finances in 2003/04 and its decisions in the 2004/05 budget to reduce the growth of govern- ment spending to a more realistic rate and to eschew [...] In any event, given the complexity of the statistics that make up a province’s annual budget statement, it is difficult for the media and ordinary citizens to judge the successes and failures of the exercise. [...] For each budget, I assign three sub- grades: Grade I, which judges the state of the province’s fiscal finances leading up to the release of the fiscal year 2004/05 budget; Grade II, which assesses the accountability of the 2003/04 budget statistics in relation to standardized budget data and revised data one year later — in effect, a measure of the budget’s accuracy; and Grade III, which marks the [...] After sketching the background of economic and fiscal trends in the Atlantic provinces and describ- ing the system I use to grade their provincial finances, I come to the heart of the study — the grades themselves.