BUDGETING BECOMES BRANDING
The use of silly budget titles and even sillier rhetoric has been a bipartisan effort over the last decade, but it has found new life under Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. Budgeting under Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau has become less a detailed outline of how the federal government plans to spend taxpayer money, and more an exercise in political messaging. We’ll soon see if that’s also true with the provincial Liberals’ budget, expected later this month.
The federal Liberals’ first budget, in 2016, was called “Growing the Middle Class,” and last year it was “Building a Strong Middle Class.” In 2018, the middle class has been thrown on the back burner, with a title of “Equality + Growth: A Strong Middle Class.” Talk about political branding.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some great things in the latest federal budget, but they’re mostly buried under sloganeering. My favourite is the strange attack on what the Liberals consider “austerity.”
The government chose investments that “reflected the choice to reject austerity policies and instead invest wisely in strengthening the middle class and growing the economy.” Austerity, the budget reminds us, “should not turn into a rigid ideology about deficits that sees any investment as bad spending.”
In fairness, it is a valid point that austerity should not be viewed as a rigid ideology; give the Liberals credit for reminding us of this. At the same time, we should also remind ourselves that the concept of “austerity” is about as vague and meaningless an idea as “innovation” (a word that was, by the way, mercilessly sucked of all possible meaning in last year’s budget). Saying a government will pursue “investment over austerity” is about as misleading as claiming to pursue “democracy over stability”; only the most partisan fanatic would ever suggest the two concepts are somehow mutually exclusive.
It all depends on context. Are we talking, for instance, about the type of austerity that the International Monetary Fund infamously imposed on developing countries during the 1990s? Is it the austerity that the European Union has tried to impose, with various levels of success, on some of its member nations? Or are we talking about the type of austerity that says governments shouldn’t spend $8 million dollars on a skating rink that will be used for three months and then discarded?
Is it austere to demand that a government remain committed to an election pledge that promised only “modest deficits” of no more than $10 billion, in the case of the federal Liberals? Is it austere of an electorate to expect that Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa should stick to his government’s original promise of balancing the books this year?
Federal Budget 2018 is here to help. It tells us that the Liberal idea of austerity includes measures like spending cuts and tax increases. This first point might validly count as being universally applicable to the idea of austerity, although I’m not convinced that the Liberals have ever been under tremendous pressure to cut spending. Rather, opposition to Liberal policies has been based more on unnecessary spending increases.
And I’m unaware of any major group or opposition party that is currently calling for the Liberals to pursue fiscal austerity by increasing taxes. Even if that were the case, is it not a bit disingenuous to claim, on the one hand, a rejection of tax increases, while on the other hand trumpeting your government’s decision to raise taxes on the wealthy and touting a federally enforced carbon tax?
The federal government long ago threw out the concept that a government budget should resemble anything close to what most people would consider an actual budget. But in Justin Trudeau’s Canada, our federal budgets have become so devoid of substance, such blatant displays of political branding, that they are now little more than exercises in sloganeering and ideological signalling. Let’s hope, for the sake of sanity, that individual households and businesses don’t also jump on this bandwagon.
Having said that, calling your annual grocery budget “Food Security in an Age of Disruption” might make going to the grocery store more exciting.