Liberals try to ease anxiety, get Canada ready for future

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, the second since the Liberals formed a majority government in 2015.

“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?”

After setting up the doom and gloom, Morneau knocked it down: Canadians, he said, have always been able to adapt to changing circumstances.

And the lower-than-expected deficit projection of $25.5 billion for the coming fiscal year – it swells to $28.5 billion when a $3 billion contingency reserve is included – is designed to help them get there.

The budget 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.

It aims to get out-of-work Canadians back to school or retrained without giving up their employment insurance benefits, includes a pilot project to explore making it easier for adults to access student loans and grants, and encourages young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math.

The Liberals do not just want to help Canadians find jobs in the future. They’re also trying to bring that future about.

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.

As the Liberals work to ensure everyone can find a job in the new economy, they are also giving a boost to many who were left behind by the traditional one, such as women and Indigenous Peoples.

The budget commits $7 billion over the next decade to help increase access to affordable child care, allow women to begin maternity leave earlier and support those caring for an ill or aging relative – all seen as ways to help increase the participation of women in the workforce.

The budget document, for the first time in Canadian history, also includes a section on how many of its measures impact men and women in different ways, with a promise to do a deeper genderbased analysis for the 2018 budget.

While relatively thin on net new spending, the budget’s new promises still come with a cost, especially since the federal government is still footing the bill for the gigantic, ongoing commitments from last year.

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 additional cost coming from the measures that will give more people access to benefits.

The government is also looking for savings in other ways that will hit the pocketbooks of many Canadians, by eliminating the public transit tax credit, raising the tax on alcohol by two per cent – beginning Thursday – and changing the rules so that ride-sharing businesses, such as Uber, are subject to the same sales taxes as traditional taxis.

The deficit still remains nearly Minister of Finance Bill Morneau delivers the federal budget in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill Wednesday. three times the $10-billion limit the Liberals promised in their campaign platform and while the budget’s projections show it shrinking over time as the government expects economic growth to pick up steam, there is still no official word on when they expect to get back to balance.

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.