When Finance Minister Bill Morneau presented his first budget full of big ugly deficit numbers last month, he likely wasn't expecting to have to downplay booming monthly jobs numbers just a few weeks later.
On Friday, in the wake of an employment report that said the country created four times as many jobs as were forecast for the month of March, Morneau tried not to sound too optimistic.
"It says to me what it would say to anybody looking at the report — that we have some good hiring," Morneau said during an interview with Dianne Buckner, host of The Exchange on the CBC News Network. "I think we need to always be conscious of the fact that hiring comes in cycles."
"We do need to recognize there are challenges across this country, and as a government we're focused on trying to help Canadians to not only do well today but to do well tomorrow."
Finance Minister Bill Morneau talks with students during post-budget tour stop at Ryerson University in Toronto on Friday. (Shawn Benjamin/CBC)
In Toronto to support the Liberal government's budget, Morneau was questioned about whether the government set its economic expectations low to make it easier to reach its targets.
For the budget, more than a dozen private sector economists were consulted, and they said they expected Canada's GDP to grow by 2.4 per cent in nominal terms this year.
However, the Liberals said they expected the economy would grow by $40 billion a year less than its own advisers were saying in each of the next five years.
Speaking Friday, Morneau said the government found that private sector economic forecasts over the past three years
had been, on average, $40 billion too optimistic in terms of GDP numbers.
"We don't want to be too optimistic," Morneau said. "We want to take a prudent course of action."
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