Opinion: Coyne, Den Tandt.
Handful of goodies designed to bring rural folk back to the fold
OTTAWA — You could call it the macaroni-and-tuna budget; anodyne, unambitious, comfort food. Among the 10 fiscal blueprints delivered by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty since 2006, this may be the most unremarkable of them all.
But as a political document, it is clever indeed. For in Blue Country, particularly in rural and small-town Ontario, this budget will quietly reassure middle-income, working people that the Tories understand basic expectations, and also know their place. That appears to be the whole point: to make the Harper government less annoying. As far as that goes, it will be mission accomplished.
Tuesday’s budget speech had a markedly more reserved tone than the past two instalments, and also a distinctly more centrist approach to cutting spending. Flaherty said the government “remains committed” to balancing the budget in 2015 — not the same as saying they will do so. And there were caveats: “I must be clear. We did not do this on the backs of ordinary Canadians or Canadians in need, or at the expense of our provinces and territories. We did not cut the programs Canadians rely on. We did not cut transfers to our provinces and territories — money they use for things like education and health care.”
As a battle cry for Ayn Randian Libertarians, it leaves something to be desired. But that appears to be the point; the language is as non-ideological as these Conservatives get. Likewise the content. Who can be against apprenticeships? Or cracking down on big companies that charge more in Canada than they do in the United States, for the same product? “Canadians work hard and should not be gouged with higher prices simply because of where they live,” thunders the budget book on page 180. Huzzah! Details of implementation, we’re discreetly told on the following page, “will be announced in the coming months.”
This isn’t to say there’s nothing here for the Conservative base. There absolutely is, given that the base includes great swaths of rural and small-town Ontario. Since the federal long-gun registry was deleted, the rural Ontario voter has had little to cheer about on the federal scene, and much to lament, most notably the Wright-Duffy debacle.
So here, just in time, is something to bring rural folk back to the fold: improved broadband Internet access, to the tune of $305 million over five years, with the goal of bringing high-speed access to an additional 280,000 rural homes. That would represent near universal access, the budget book states. Hard information and timelines are absent. Nevertheless, the pledge will be well received in rural Ontario, where highspeed access is still difficult to obtain and expensive to maintain, when it can be obtained.
And there are other goodies that will resonate particularly well in small towns. These include measures to reduce red tape for small craft breweries; more investment in parks; $15 million in new funding over two years for recreational fisheries; tax measures to ease gifts of ecologically sensitive land, and $10 million over two years for snowmobile trails. The target demographic here is hunters, anglers and farmers — the same folks who drove the scrapping of the gun registry.
Add to that the new tax credit for search and rescue volunteers, modest reductions in the administrative burden on charities, additional help for handicapped workers and new funding for Special Olympics Canada — a relatively small $10.8 million over four years, but symbolically important — and you have a package of relatively low-cost measures calculated to appeal to core Conservative supporters, while not offending others. It’s budget-making with a scalpel, not a hammer. As a final signal of its ideological inoffensiveness, Budget 2014 maintains existing support for cultural programs, among them the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Music Fund. Here again, the dollar amounts are not huge, $105 million in total per year. But the maintenance of such funding, at a time when the government is preaching austerity, sends a message to small communities in which arts funding is an important cultural and economic support.
How is it all to be paid for? Since the spending is highly targeted, and a balanced budget still a year away, that’s not the problem it might otherwise be.
But to the extent new money had to be found, it comes from an increase in taxes on tobacco — which few will oppose — and from shoving $3.1 billion in defence procurement to 201516, after the next election. Again, most Canadians will yawn. And, to the brass at DND: Thank you for the F-35 debacle.
In all, then, it’s a plan that was designed to be not bad and is, in fact, not bad.
The risk in it, politically, is just this: that every measure in the budget book is anodyne, and could thus be inherited by any future government, whether Liberal or New Democrat. In 2012, the Tories were bent on persuading Canadians they were transforming Canada.
Today they’re thinking about survival. That has made them cautious, more so than ever before.