First Nations, feminist foreign aid are big budget priorities

The new federal budget promises a national pharmacare program without promising any money to pay for one.

It’s symbolic of a budget that talks about the middle class on every page, spends $7 billion more than the Liberal government planned, and somehow does relatively little for the middle class’s benefit.

Medications are a huge part of our health care spending and their share is growing every year as science figures out how to help us live longer with chronic conditions. Surgery here won’t bankrupt you, but diabetes might.

One in 10 Canadians has prescriptions they have trouble affording, the budget book says, and “every year, almost one million Canadians give up food and heat to afford medicines.” Those numbers aren’t compatible with an idea of Canada as a country with universal health care.

Ontario’s health minister Eric Hoskins abruptly quit provincial politics Monday afternoon to head up a national panel that will tell the feds how to nationalize the costs of medical drugs. He’s named in Tuesday’s budget book, so Monday was just about as late as he could go. Hoskins is a serious person and his quitting a senior provincial post suggests the federal government is serious, too.

The budget, however, suggests otherwise. It sets aside nothing for anything Hoskins’ group might propose. Zero dollars.

You wouldn’t expect to see anything this year, but there’s nothing as far as the budget horizon goes.

This budget talks about the middle class on practically every page — and somehow spends $7 billion more than the government expected to when it looked ahead in last year’s budget — but it doesn’t include a ton of spending for middle-class purposes.

Based on the hard numbers, the budget’s priorities are improving life for Indigenous Peoples and advancing a feminist foreign-aid agenda. Those are defensible — even noble, wise and proper — objectives for the federal government. They just aren’t what Finance Minister Bill Morneau spent most of his budget speech talking about.

He talked for minutes about the economic benefits of promoting women in the working world as entrepreneurs, scientists and corporate captains: We could boost our economy by four per cent — “Four per cent, Mr. Speaker!” — he said, if men and women were equally represented in Canada’s workforce. More than a sixth of the budget book is devoted to a gender-based analysis of the government’s policies generally.

But in actual dollars, we’re talking low millions. A few hundred thousand dollars for Statistics Canada to collect better statistics on “gender, diversity and inclusion.” A million and change for a “national conversation on gender equality with young Canadians.” A grant to encourage women to apprentice in the trades gets $4 million a year.

There’s a $100-million program to back creative programs for preschool and daycare, but it’s to be spent over 11 years. The “Canada-China Year of Tourism” is getting that much this year.

The big deal is longer and more flexible parental leave, a $344-million-a-year program to add five weeks to the total time parents can take off after the birth of a child. Typically, it’s moms who take extended time away after having kids, so the idea is that fathers will take that time.

Families can do it if dad has full-time work and can afford to sacrifice full-time earnings, since government-funded parental leave covers only 55 per cent of your average weekly pay. So this is a benefit for the upper middle class, not for people scratching out livings in the gig economy or workers without employer top-ups. More family time is, in itself, a good thing. But let’s not pretend this program is something it’s not.

In contrast, various forms of aid abroad, under the umbrella of “Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy,” are getting a $700-million-a-year boost. That’s the big money.

Liberal governments in Canada don’t talk about nationalizing industries or fighting free trade. They talk about smoothing out the bumps in our finances — helping people in their everyday lives, as Premier Kathleen Wynne puts it.

In an unstable, constantly disrupted economy, we can’t count on jobs for life even if we work hard and make safe choices, so governments step in with subsidized child care, more generous support for college and university educations, and richer public pensions. Now, perhaps, there will be drug coverage that’s separate from employer-sponsored benefits plans.

Pharmacare will be expensive and paying for it will take tax hikes, and conservatives will instinctively oppose it.

But the middle class is frightened and the middle class votes. Politicians fail to soothe the middle class at their peril. Very likely, the Liberals have found their 2019 election fight.

The big deal is longer and more flexible parental leave, a $344-million-a-year program to add five weeks to the total time parents can take off after the birth of a child.