National Post (National Edition)
IF I WERE FINANCE MINISTER …
The first thing I would tell the House of Commons on budget day is that we have to start meeting like this more often. We should never again go 725 days between budgets, as we just did. There was a federal budget every year of the First World War, including two in 1914. There was a budget every year of the Second World War. Canada is one of the longest-standing multiparty democracies in a world in which the biggest rising power mocks the very idea of “bourgeois democracy.” Quite apart from what is good for ourselves, we have a duty to show the resilience of our system and, let's be frank, the superiority of government that is truly of, by and for the people. And we need to do that in bad times, not just good. We have done so during past crises, but not in the past two years.
In my budget, we're not building back anything, neither better, right, greener nor fairer. There's nothing to build back. We weren't hit by a countrywide hurricane on March 11, 2020. We suffered a forced pause. All the buildings, roads, bridges, power stations, airports and so on that existed then still exist now. We don't need special programs to build anything back. Especially not when catchy slogans mainly serve as portmanteaux for long-standing wish lists from long-established lobbies.
What happened last March is that the normal life of most of us was abruptly interrupted. We are all eager to get back to it. If this pandemic is like many others before it, we will be able to do so. Our biggest problem is that a generation of young people has had its education delayed a year. Governments, school boards, schools, teachers and parents will have to figure out how they catch up. That is a family and provincial responsibility. The federal government should stand aside and let them get on with it. In my budget, Ottawa would not spend money either pretending it has a role or demonstrating it understands the importance of the problem, which is the modern politician's way of showing respect for a problem, whether or not money stands any chance of solving it.
Same with health care, another provincial responsibility. The pandemic has “laid bare,” as the phrase goes, that, although the men and women who staff Medicare are heroic, the system itself is inflexible. The number of ICU patients capable of bringing it to its knees is essentially the same in the third wave as it was in the first, despite a year having passed and large parts of the rest of the system being shut down. We need a more flexible, responsive system. But the federal government's role is only to remove any and all obstacles to provincial experimentation in health care.
Our vaccine rollout, it need hardly be said, has been unsatisfactory. The nations doing best created a demand for vaccines using public money but relied on private companies for development and production. The federal government needs to reflect seriously on how decades of anti-corporate pharmaceuticals pricing policies have discouraged world-leading companies from establishing sufficient vaccine capacity here.
Apart from that, our overriding purpose should be to return to normal as quickly as possible — to get back to where we were 13 months ago and then to proceed with the normal political give-and-take of incremental policy-making. To that end, we need to eliminate all emergency benefits as quickly as the health situation allows, get federal spending back down to where it was before the emergency and reduce the deficit to levels appropriate to the full-employment economy we experienced pre-pandemic and should be able to get back to. In fact, when we do reach full employment again, we should be running surpluses rather than deficits. The lesson of the 1990s and 2000s was that fiscal responsibility in good times allowed for fiscal flexibility when trouble hit, as it did in 2008-9. The lesson of the mid-1990s was that deficits can fall fast when governments put their mind to it. We went from a $30-billion federal deficit in 1995-96 ($47.3 billion in today's dollars) to a surplus just two years later, without the advantage of having emergency payouts to cut.
We need to understand that what we just went through was an emergency. The federal government supporting millions of Canadians was not and should not become normal. Normal should be that Canadians work for their living, in part so they can save for rainy days or even rainy years. Governments can and should provide assistance when people meet with personal disaster. But normal life is, not a government-guaranteed income, but all of us who can working for our living and paying taxes so that governments can do for us what only governments can do. But only that. Not be a friend or paymaster or loan-buddy to everyone.
If I were finance minister, the budget would be a lot shorter. In 2019 the Budget Plan, the main budget document, was 460 pages. The budget should be no longer than the average Canadian adult can read in an hour. And it should be factual. In recent years, budgets have become bloated with governmental self-praise. Governments should be allowed to praise themselves, and of course they will whether allowed to or not, but their
budgets should be factual and simply describe how new initiatives, if there are any, will work and what they will cost.
If I were finance minister, there would be many fewer initiatives. Modern budgets typically contain dozens of them, even hundreds. The past budget included 193. In 2019, Canada was not imperfect in 193 ways. There should be many fewer new initiatives and each should be accompanied by a statement of what it intends to accomplish and what evidence there is that it will actually achieve the results desired. If I were finance minister, I would have the auditor general comment on policies before they went to Parliament, not several years after the money has started flowing.
And I would enlarge the office of the auditor general and provide enough funding that a third of her staff work on program elimination. For 150 years, the federal budget ratchet has been clicking away: new programs are introduced every year but only rarely are any eliminated. As a result, we are now awash in programs. The main federal government website has a section “Grants and funding” that invites Canadians to “Find funding you need from the Government of Canada.” Click on it and you are asked “What type of funding are you looking for?” You get 12 choices. If you choose “Agriculture,” there are 3,119 results. You're given a choice of “What commodity are you working with?” Choose “Grains, cereals and other crops” and there are 459 choices.
The past budget actually recognized this problem. It noted that across 30 departments the federal government was running more than 106 programs aimed at skills development, a jungle so impenetrable the government proposed rationalization. As the Budget Plan meekly put it, “Targeted changes could be made to help Canadians more easily navigate the programs and supports they need.”
The biggest favour any finance minister could do for Canadians would be to cut out the undergrowth, streamline the federal government and make sure it delivers programs efficiently and for the benefit of citizens, not the political benefit of the party in power.
ELIMINATE ALL EMERGENCY BENEFITS AS QUICKLY AS THE HEALTH SITUATION ALLOWS.