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OTTAWA — The federal Finance Department doesn’t expect to have a balanced budget until 2040, but that’s five years earlier than the government predicted last year.

Long-term budgetary projections released Friday morning estimate that by the end of fiscal year 2040-2041, federal books will be in surplus by $1.7 billion.

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The Trudeau Liberals promised during the 2015 election to balance the books by the end of their mandate — 2019 — after running small deficits.

The government’s February budget predicted a deficit of $18.1 billion for the current 2018-19 fiscal year, which ends in March.

The report says federal finances appear sustainable over the long term, with the government’s favoured fiscal number, the federal debt as a percentage of gross domestic product, expected to decline over time. That’s a way of measuring how heavy the debt burden is compared with the size of the national economy rather than just tallying the total the federal government owes.