Liberals looking to the future
Deficit remains nearly 3 times the $10-B limit promised in campaign
OTTAWA — The future is coming at you, fast, and the Liberal government says it knows you’re getting anxious — and potentially angry.
Finance Minister Bill Morneau delivered a federal budget Wednesday that aims to get Canadians ready for a changing world and potentially shield the Liberals from the forces that brought U.S. President Donald Trump to power.
“Everyday folks who work hard to provide for their families are worried about the future,” Morneau said in his speech to the House of Commons as he tabled the 2017 federal budget.
“They’re worried that rapid technological change, the seemingly never-ending need for new skills and growing demands on our time will mean that their kids won’t have the same opportunities that they had. And who can blame them?”
The budget has a lower-than-expected deficit projection of $25.5 billion for the coming fiscal year — $28.5 billion when a $3 billion contingency reserve is included.
It includes about $5.2 billion for skills development to help Canadians adapt their education and employment training to a diversifying economy — one in which the natural resource sector offers no guarantees of jobs or sustained federal revenues.
The budget commits nearly $3 billion to support innovation over the next five years and promises to develop an innovation and skills plan that will target six sectors the Liberal government see as good bets for spurring economic growth and creating well-paying jobs: advanced manufacturing, clean technology, the agri-food sector, digital industries, clean resources and health and bio-sciences.
Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose said the budget does little to ease the anxiety of those ordinary Canadians — oil rig workers, hairstylists, family farmers — unmoved by soaring Liberal rhetoric about innovation.
“If you have what’s called a ‘super cluster venture capital accelerator,’ you’re in luck,” Ambrose said. “Those are the kinds of people that are going to get a break, not regular working people.”
Canadians can expect a five-cent increase in EI premiums in fiscal 2018-19, up to $1.68 per $100 of insurable earnings, with some of that cost coming from the measures to give more people access to benefits.
The budget hits the pocketbooks of Canadians in other ways, as well. Gone is a public transit tax credit; tobacco and alcohol taxes are going up.
The deficit remains nearly three times the $10-billion limit the Liberals promised in their campaign platform. And although it is shrinking more quickly than expected, there is still no official word on when it will be eliminated.
This budget also removes a pledge to reduce the ratio of federal debt to GDP over the course of their mandate, which, after busting past their promise to eliminate the deficit by 2019, was the only fiscal target they had left.