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Ostensibly, Canada’s finance minister will be there to explain and defend the government’s Budget Implementation Act, or Bill C-59. But, more likely, the focus will turn to the economy and questions about how things could have gone so wrong.

When Oliver tabled his 2015-16 budget on April 21, the oil-price implosion was flagged as the main threat to Ottawa’s long-promised goal of balancing the books, with a good chunk of change to spare — in the form of a $1.4-billion surplus.

Not to worry, he said at the time, we also have a cushion — a $1-billion “adjustment for risk” — set aside in the government’s contingency fund just in case all doesn’t go as planned.

It hasn’t. The energy crunch is taking a bigger and longer bite out of the economy than Oliver — or anyone, really — had foreseen only a half-dozen weeks ago.

Even earlier, Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz, who in January took the extraordinary — and unexpected — measure of cutting his trendsetting interest rate, said he needed to provide “insurance” against the anticipated “front-loaded” and “atrocious” first-quarter whack to gross domestic product from the collapse of crude.

Turns out, he was right — and then some.

Canada’s GDP actually contracted by an annualized 0.6 per cent between January and March, when most forecasts called for a slight increase of 0.3 per cent.

And instead of two-per-cent growth overall this year, as Oliver had expected, economists are saying it will be closer to 1.5 per cent — if even that.