BALANCED BUDGET ACT JUST ANOTHER LAW TO BREAK
Remember, this is the same government that passed rules on fixed election dates
With the precedent set by the new Balanced Budgets Act, or whatever it is the Tories end up calling their proposed law banning themselves from running deficits like the deficits they have run through seven of their nine years in office, the way is clear for the Conservatives to press on to still more historic legislative firsts. I am thinking of the Selling Your Own Grandmother Act, since in the absence of legislation that is exactly the sort of thing this government would not think twice before doing.
Seriously, are they serious? Do they take us for fools? Is the whole of Canadian politics an endless re- enactment of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown? It would be one thing if it were merely a matter of a government that drove spending to record heights even before the recession, then added another $ 150 billion to the debt in a burst of unneeded “stimulus” spending after the recovery was underway, suddenly asking to be congratulated for its ironclad commitment to fiscal discipline.
But this is the same government, remember, that early in its tenure passed the Fixed Election Dates Act ( actually, it was called An Act to Amend the Canada Elections Act) mandating that elections should be called, not at the whim of the prime minister, but on a fixed four- year timetable. And it was this government that, the minute it was to its advantage, called an election, less than three years into its term. But now we should trust them? Should we call it the This Time We Mean It Act?
That’s hardly the only promise this government has broken, but it is surely the most egregious. The point, after all, of setting it in law was to suggest that this was more than an ordinary political promise, of a kind we have more or less come to expect politicians of all parties to break. This was different: It was a law, a solemn and binding commitment, set out in writing. And then they went ahead and broke it anyway.
To be sure, the law came with its own built- in loophole, in the form of the royal prerogative: the constitutional principle that the discretion of the governor general to call an election when it pleases him ( which is to say, when his first minister advises) may not be constrained by law, though it is by convention. And to be sure, the balanced budget law will come with its own escape hatches: in case of a recession, or “extraordinary circumstance,” such as a war or natural disaster, as the finance minister explained in a speech Wednesday.
If a finance minister posted a deficit “outside of these extraordinary circumstances,” operating spending would automatically be frozen. The minister would be required to appear before the Commons finance committee, and to present a plan “with concrete timelines to return to balanced budgets.” Until such time his salary, and those of all other ministers and deputy minister, would be cut by five per cent.
That is, unless they weren’t. The track record of these kinds of laws is that even with all the inevitable caveats and conditions, governments that want to run deficits — or call snap elections, or raise taxes, or any of the things they had earlier forbidden themselves from doing — do so. Either they wriggle through a loophole, as the Tories did in 2008 and as the premier of Alberta has just done with his province’s fixed- date law, or they change the law, as governments in Manitoba and Ontario did when they wanted to raise taxes.
Critics of such laws sniff that this shows how useless they are. I’m more inclined to say it shows how untrustworthy our governments have become. Whether a law is enforceable is a legitimate inquiry, when we are talking about random street miscreants and other sections of the crooked timber of humanity. It is rather startling to hear the same said, or not said but automatically and unthinkingly assumed, of the people who pass the laws.
We absolutely have a right to expect that when the people we elect swear on a stack of statute books they will do something, or not do something, they will keep their word, and if they will not that is not a black mark against the promises, but the promisebreakers. If critics think it unreasonable to hold governments to their promises, even to a promise merely to obey the law, what would they hold them to?
Of course, it may equally be said that a government that was sincerely committed to balancing the budget would not need a law to tell it to, and that’s true enough. The more interesting cases are those in between, for whom the spirit, as it were, is willing but the flesh is weak. Laws are no substitute for political will, but laws can buttress will. A government that wished to balance the budget, but felt vulnerable to political pressure, might find it helpful to lash itself to the mast of a legislated obligation, much as governments do free- trade deals, or the Charter of Rights.
The legal and the political are too often held up as separate spheres, as in “this is not a legal question but a political one.” In fact the two constantly inform each other: what is legal is often a political matter, and what is politic will often be shaped and framed by the law — by the desire of people to live in a law- based state. A balanced budget law doesn’t have to work perfectly to be of use: it only has to work sometimes, less as a barrier than a well- marked boundary, pushing and prodding governments to get back to balance.
At any rate, the people who think such a law will be ineffective should really have a talk with the people who think it will be too effective, barring governments from running deficits when they really should. I cannot think of too many examples of this, and I do not lie awake at night worrying we will see more.
The legal and the political are too often held up as separate spheres ...