A CRITIQUE FOR ANY LAW
Reaction to proposed balanced- budget legislation has a quite familiar ring to it
If you can’t even accept that mild limitation on your spending habits, it doesn’t speak well of your commitment to fiscal sobriety. So, again: why all the commotion? Andrew Coyne All laws bind future Parliaments until they are revoked. They are not permanently binding ...
All right, all right, we’ve all had our bit of fun. I admit it was good sport to ridicule the Conservative government, the government that has run seven consecutive deficits, for bringing in legislation that would make it harder for governments to run deficits.
It was too easy to point out that the same government that now proposes to bind itself to balance the budget every year also passed legislation requiring elections to be held on a fixed schedule, only to throw it over at the first opportunity. Fish in a barrel would make a more elusive target.
But we already knew the Harper Conservatives were shameless hypocrites. What about the legislation itself? No doubt it is intended to appeal to the base in an election year, to reassure them of the government’s fiscal conservative bona fides, as every armchair strategist noted. But how does it stand up on its merits?
Not well, in the all- but- unanimous view of the commentariat. “Balanced- budget legislation is a singularly futile undertaking,” despaired the Globe and Mail, in its singularly overwrought style. “It’s either a symbolic and empty gesture, or a binding commitment that should never be made.”
It’s “nothing more than a political gesture,” agreed the Toronto Star, finding “loopholes big enough to allow the government to do pretty much what it wants” in legislation it has not yet seen — though like the Globe it was simultaneously convinced that it would be even worse if it did work, in as much as “it aims to tie the hands of future elected governments.”
And so on. “You can’t legislate responsibility,” writes the National Post’s Tasha Kheiriddin. “You can’t bind future generations of legislators.” Or rather, you can, frets the Globe’s David Parkinson, “hamstringing future governments from using their fiscal levers to stabilize a wobbling economy.” Etc. etc. etc.
Reading these sages, one is inclined to ask: to what laws, pray, would these criticisms not apply? It binds future Parliaments? So does any law. It’s ineffective, rather, because it can just be revoked at any time? That’s true of any law, too. All laws bind future Parliaments until they are revoked. They are not permanently binding simply for being passed by Parliament; neither does the possibility of their repeal render them futile, meaningless gestures.
The notion that law consists of only those two options, starkly opposed — or either of them — makes one wonder what they think the law is for generally. Do we imagine that every time a government passes a law, it is deciding the matter for all future governments? Do we suppose that every time a law is amended or repealed, it proves the vanity of law- making as a practice?
The truth, obviously, is somewhere in between. Rather than hold out one or both of these false opposites as being the inevitable result of any given law, most of us understand that legislation is a temporary guide to government behaviour, not a permanent injunction — a back brace not a straitjacket.
It is the same false opposition that suggests constraining governments to act within the law is either unnecessary — because governments that desired to behave a certain way would do so anyway — or ineffective, because if they did not they would simply find a way around it. Most of us would recognize this as rubbish if it were said about any existing law, knowing the law exists not to take the place of political will but to give form to it, and to buttress it against the temptations of the moment.
So why the hysteria about balanced- budget legislation — especially legislation that, so far as we know anything about it, would not actually mandate balanced budgets? The finance minister, Joe Oliver, was quite clear on this. Not only was there the usual disclaimer about “extraordinary circumstances” of recession, war or natural disaster, but even in normal times, if a government were determined to go into deficit it could.
The consequences? The finance minister “would be required to testify before the House of Commons Committee on Finance and present a plan with concrete timelines to return to balanced budgets.” OH MY GOD HE’D BE REQUIRED TO TESTIFY. There’s also that bit about freezing operating spending and cutting ministers’ pay five per cent, but the principle is clear: it would not ban deficits, but only make them embarrassing.
I don’t see anything there that is unduly restrictive — and because of that, I think the chances of any government wanting to be seen to repeal it are slight: if you can’t even accept that mild limitation on your spending habits, it doesn’t speak well of your commitment to fiscal sobriety. So, again: why all the commotion?
One part of it may be a suggestion that it is somehow improper to extend the reach of law into the field of economics. But we do that all the time — every time a tax bill is passed, or a budget, we are entrenching a particular view of economic policy in law. Either a subsequent government sees fit to change it, or it doesn’t: the world does not end either way.
One is left with the strong impression that the basic objection — beyond those who are simply opposed to balanced budgets in and of themselves — is that this involves a departure from the status quo. I recall the same protests voiced over free trade agreements, or the Bank of Canada’s inflation targets, previous efforts at legislating economic policy, once controversial, that are now the norm.
I guarantee you: if governments did not conduct tax policy through legislation, but simply sent out the bailiffs to seize people’s money, and if it were proposed that henceforth they should have to set out how they intended to raise revenues — how much, by what means, for what purpose etc. — in writing, and stick to it, we’d hear all of the same complaints, from the same people, that we’re hearing now. But eventually they’d get over it.