Harper, Mcguinty aiming at same target

Budgets place cost-cutting burden on public servants

OTTAWA— Within months if not weeks, it will be difficult — at least in Central Canada — not to run into someone directly hit by the austerity measures of the federal and provincial governments.

In Ontario, that may be downright impossible.

As ideologically different as they may be, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Premier Dalton Mcguinty have opted for similar tracks to restore their government finances to health.

They have placed the burden of their belt-tightening exercises not on taxpayers but on the public servants who deliver their programs.

In Ontario, anyone who draws a paycheque from the province — from teachers to nurses to social workers to bureaucrats — is about to fall under a salary freeze.

At the federal level, about 20,000 public service jobs are to disappear.

And that is only a beginning, as more jobs will go when the impact of some of the cuts announced in Thursday’s budget filter down to the host of agencies, organizations and crown corporations that depend on federal funding. The bulk of those jobs are in Ontario. In time, public services will shrink in tandem with slow or no-growth budgets.

In the years to come for instance, spending on the health system is expected to increase at half of the current rate in Ontario. And health care still sits at the top of the pecking order of government priorities. Other programs will fare worse, if they survive at all.

Before that happens, the budget wars will likely spill over to the streets as the social peace of the past years is replaced by a potentially long season of discontent.

Already this spring, the sight of striking students blocking rush hour traffic has become familiar to home- or work-bound Quebecers.

The students have been protesting against a substantial hike in university tuition fees. That is not usually a cause that brings older generations to their feet but in this instance the demonstrators may be winning public opinion over to their side. Their war of attrition on the government could kill Charest’s already-modest re-election chances.

At the same time, a trip through the country’s major airports has become more unpredictable as Air Canada workers, stripped of their full bargaining rights by the Conservatives, vent their frustrations on the travelling public.

As the Ontario budget measures trickle down to the classrooms, the hospital wards and the university halls of Canada’s largest province, labour unrest stands to also spread to its streets — at possible cost to the fortunes of the government.

Austerity defined Mcguinty’s budget but the reduced prospects that are about to become the new normal for Ontarians could also be found between the lines of Thursday’s federal budget.

On that score, the restraint chapters of federal finance minister Jim Flaherty’s budget told only part of the story. And the right-wing ideology of its political authors was not its most striking feature.

The budget Flaherty brought down in the House of Commons this week is not as harsh as some of those his Conservative government delivered at Queen’s Park at the time of Ontario’s so-called Common Sense Revolution in the mid-1990s. Over that same period, the Liberal tandem of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin cut more public service jobs than Flaherty. They also took a bigger cut out of the social programs envelope.

Like today’s Conservatives, the Liberals cut the CBC budget. For years, they paid little more than lip service to the environment, the military and foreign aid.

But through it all, the economic ball the Chrétien/martin Liberals had their eyes fixed on was one that rolled through the manufacturing sector of Ontario and — to a lesser degree — Quebec.

In the outlook of the Harper government, Central Canada in its capacity as an economic engine mostly appears in the rear-view mirror. It is only central in geographical terms

In the big picture, what lies under the ground mostly in energy-rich Western Canada has become more important to the country’s prosperity than what is manufactured over the ground mostly in Ontario. There have always been competing economies in Canada and at times their needs have conflicted. But in the past, Ontario had always held the bigger end of the stick. Thursday’s federal budget confirms that the government no longer sees the economic future of the country mostly through the prism of its largest provinces. Over the past 25 years, no federal budget has ever given as large a place to the expansion of the resource-based economy. The Flaherty budget all but defines the national interest in terms of the capacity of Canada to exploit and market its resources. And it signals that Harper will marshal the considerable means of the federal government to achieve that objective. That includes a smaller environment department, a substantial reduction in environment oversight as assessments of largescale projects is speeded up and a systematic effort to diminish the impact of the pro-environment lobby. Non-profit groups will have their advocacy spending scrutinized with an eye to withdrawing their charitable status if they are judged to have spent too much time in the political trenches. And the National Round Table on the Economy and the Environment will be eliminated. In total, the Flaherty budget may be the least green federal budget in decades. Harper is not the first prime minister to state that he wants Canada to be an energy superpower — Martin also used to say that — but the Conservative PM is the first to put his political will so squarely behind that proposition. When all is said and done, the aggressive pursuit of a more resource-based economy is what most distinguishes this majority budget from the previous Conservative installments. If it had been brought to a minority Parliament, it is that section of the budget and not the cuts to the civil service that the opposition parties would ultimately have choked on. That being said, over the six years the Conservatives have been in power and in the wake of the global economic crisis there is no escaping the fact that the equation between more prosperity and more resource development has become a dominant factor in the budget calculations of much of the country. These days in Canada, the top provincial performers all reap the dividends of that equation. And some of the laggers are looking to it for salvation. Take Quebec — a province that likes to brag about its green credentials. The centrepiece of its March budget was the Plan Nord, a multi-billion-dollar bid by Charest to tap the resources of the undeveloped northernmost areas of the province. To sustain its social safety net, Quebec’s Liberal government is turning to projected increases in revenues from its natural resources. When it comes to squeezing savings from the government, Harper and Mcguinty have ended up on the same budget page but when it comes to generating wealth, the Prime Minister is travelling on a route more similar to Charest’s. For all that, it would be an overstatement to say that Harper’s path to prosperity is strikingly different from Mcguinty’s. Ontario’s roadmap to generating wealth from the unfamiliar wrong side of the Canadian economic track is still a work in progress. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.