Flaherty’s benign behemoth

Budget speeches aren’t known for their rhetorical achievement but in what may be his final federal budget, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty turned a nice phrase by saying that Canadians want to have faith that “government will be a benign and silent partner in their enterprise. And not an overbearing behemoth squeezing them at every turn.” (Budgets aren’t known for their grammatical achievement, either. Sentence fragments. Get their own. Capitalization and periods. All the time. Maybe part of being silent is to talk in little bites of sound.)

“Benign” is good, bringing to mind Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous concept of “benign neglect,” which was his recommendation for race relations in the United States after the riots of the 1960s. That’s a good recommendation for lots of social problems. “Silent” seems peculiar. Silence is often a virtue — though you wouldn’t think so listening to politicians. Minister Flaherty’s government is seldom silent. If it truly wanted to be silent, it wouldn’t spend so much advertising the benefits of “Canada’s Economic Action Plan.” After yesterday, we can only dread the amount of non-silence that is about to befall us, courtesy our own tax dollars.

As for “behemoth,” it’s hard for an entity proposing to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars on programs next year to claim not to be a behemoth. But it seems some observers are buying it. For instance, the message of the CBC’s instant coverage of the budget was that there wasn’t nearly enough in it. In fact, there is quite a bit in it. The summary chapter runs to 13 pages and includes more than three dozen bullet points, most of them emphasizing expenditure.

That the CBC coverage would conclude otherwise is not surprising. The way it’s put together it consists almost exclusively of organized bitching. The minister is given about 10 seconds of camera time to say hello to Mr. Speaker and then, Bam!, Powie!, the evaluations of correspondents and opposition politicians get under way. To prove their fairness, correspondents have to be critical. To prove I don’t know what, opposition leaders never have a kind word to say — though

It’s hard for an entity spending quarter of a trillion dollars a year

to claim not to be a behemoth

Thomas Mulcair did commend Mr. Flaherty for making a northern Ontario development agency a board, or making the board an agency, or something completely bureaucratic and NDPish that his northern Ontario critic apparently had recommended.

But that was it for nice. The purpose of bringing training back to Ottawa, said Mr. Mulcair, was just to put the red maple leaf on it. Now most people who aren’t Quebec nationalists rather like the red maple leaf. On the other hand, Mr. Mulcair’s remark will remind the Quebec nationalists who voted for his party in such large numbers last time round of former separatist Premier Bernard Landry’s anguished complaint that all he could see looking out of his office window in Quebec City was the red maple leaf. Which of course sickened him. Perhaps Mr. Mulcair really wants to be Quebec premier one day. His chance of ever being Canadian prime minister recedes with every comment of this sort.

In fact, as mentioned, there is quite a bit in this budget. The summary table on p. 284 (which, good for him, Terry Milewski alluded to directly) doesn’t show a lot. But tables presented at the end of each section of the budget provide many of the details whose supposed absence was lamented by the CBC and Elizabeth May, leader of the Party of One, who was as always invited to comment.

My favourite budget detail is the “Salmon Conservation Stamp.” Apparently, the government is printing, silently and benignly no doubt, a salmon conservation stamp. And it is now going to give the proceeds to the Pacific Salmon Foundation, a not-for-profit group dedicated to improving the fishery for the benefit of “present and future generations” (though whether of fish or people the government doesn’t specify). This amounts to $1-million a year. Who knew there was this kind of money in fish stamps? Maybe each taxpayer should have his or her own stamp.

One detail I do like in the budget, even controlling for the fact that it’s a bit of red meat tossed to people like me, i.e., free-market types — the kind the CBC, rather behind the times, refers to as the “conservative base” — is that Ottawa’s going to eliminate tax breaks for Labour-Sponsored Venture Capital Funds. That’s excellent news. Economists have been recommending it for years. Good for Mr. Flaherty. It will save something like $300-million in tax breaks over five years. We need to take this kind of tough, hard-headed approach to all other tax breaks currently on offer.

Unfortunately, one reason the government says it’s able to take away this tax break is that it has set up its own Venture Capital Action Plan, which is going to spend even more than the tax breaks were worth. Thus benign gives way to behemoth in just a few paragraphs.

If you take all the end-of-section tables together, there must be over 50 separate initiatives, including one for a cool $53-billion of spending on infrastructure, albeitspread over 10 years.

Fifty-three benign, silent billions, I suppose these are. Not behemoth-ific.