Higher oil prices set to give Ottawa a multi-billion-dollar windfall

Oil is sitting around $100 US a barrel right now. But the spring economic update Ottawa released on Tuesday built its numbers on West Texas Intermediate averaging just $73 a barrel this year.

That gap is not an accident. The private-sector forecasts used to build the budget were put together in March, when the Israel-Iran war was just getting started and nobody knew how bad the disruption would get. Now, as much as 600 million barrels of oil are offline. Every day the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, another 15 million barrels pile up in the Persian Gulf.