Flaherty will map Tory path to 2015
Get set for an unsurprising, stay-the-course federal budget — one that will delight few, offend none, cause nary a blip in our collective breathless focus on Sochi, but keep the federal Conservatives inching incrementally towards their goal of re-election in 2015.
Unless of course that’s all wrong.
Over the years, the custom of pre-throne speech and pre-budget leaks has become standard operating procedure for Stephen Harper’s Tories. It’s their way of setting a frame for discussion, which they consider to be to their advantage. Rarely in recent years — and not at all since the last election — has a budget hewed to expectations. There’s often something out of left field. Anticipating one’s thrust is, therefore, a mug’s game.
Having said that, let’s consider the context into which Tuesday’s spending blueprint will fall, and a few of the areas it may address. Somewhat surprisingly, for a plan that has been so consistently undersold in the advance billing, it’s an important list.
The context: Trudeau is on the march. They have seen the enemy and his names are legion — or, more precisely, his target audience is the moderately conservative suburban swing voter, on whose shoulders the Tory majority rests. Although Justin Trudeau has yet to say how he intends to rescue the middle class from the depredations of the one per cent, we know that’s his plan. Trudeau and his MPs talk about it constantly — so much so that, even in the absence of a policy proposal, they’ve shoved the economic goalposts squarely towards centre field. Last fall’s throne speech signalled a sudden high-level Tory interest in “consumers,” which is their code for “middle class.” We know income splitting for married couples is on tap, but that’s both old news and a bird not yet in the hand; therefore they’ll need more. Further increases in the duty-free limit for cross-border shoppers and other measures to offset the impact on a lower dollar on travellers, might be one place to start.
Meanwhile, we are now entering, allegorically speaking, the Rob-Ford-is-inthe-gym phase of the Conservative majority mandate. The 2012 omnibus monster budget brouhaha, followed closely by the F-35 imbroglio, and then without pause theMike-Duffy-Nigel-Wright contretemps, blew a gigantic crater in the government’s reputation for sound management and common sense. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will therefore leave no note of fiscal prudence unvoiced as he reiterates, once more with feeling, his resolve to balance the federal budget in 2015, ahead of the next federal election. It may create a certain cognitive dissonance, especially for those who remember when balanced budgets were routine, for this to be held aloft as any government’s crowning achievement. But memories being short, this is where we are.
On Friday, the prime minister unveiled an important and praiseworthy multiyear package of reforms and new spending intended to address the chronic and unacceptable underfunding of aboriginal education in Canada. If a single social and economic policy theme has emerged over the past year, it is the need for more support for aboriginal skills training. In August, the PM focused on this issue above all others while on his summer Arctic tour. This is both good politics, for a government accused of being bloodless, and good economics, given its overwhelming focus on northern resource extraction, and the related skills shortage. If there are not substantive additional measures in this budget related to aboriginal training, the document will disappoint.
But whither the Canada Jobs Grant? Though it was a centrepiece of last year’s budget and was something of a good-news story for the Conservatives at the time, this multi-jurisdictional job-creation program has so far delivered nothing but federal-provincial wrangling. But with one of the government’s most effective ministers, Jason Kenney, on the file, there are hopes for a breakthrough, possibly involving more cash for the provinces. All eyes will be on the finance minister’s speech for signals, new timetables or both. The same goes for the Building Canada Fund, a $14-billion, 10-year project that was announced in last year’s budget, but has yet to be publicly mapped out.
There has been some disappointment among fiscal hawks in the Tory caucus in recent years that the CBC, that den of sweatervest-wearing, latte-sipping flibbertigibbets, hasn’t been cut more deeply than other federal departments in this age of austerity. The government is gearing up for a battle royale with public-sector unions, and has signalled it intends to “crack down” on charities that abuse their charitable tax status. Any or all of these would make handy fiscal whipping posts for a government always treading a fine line between the need to be moderate, thus appealing to ordinary folk, and the need to be stridently ideological, thus separating hardcore party donors from their cash. If history is any guide, Flaherty will once again tread a middle path. But, onward to budget day.