Promises, peanuts and a to-do list
This is the 22nd or 23rd federal budget I’ve covered. And I’ve never seen the like of the one Bill Morneau introduced on Wednesday.
Not even in the last days of the Harper Conservatives did a budget provide for so little new spending — $1.3 billion in the current budget year, total, in all fields of government. That’s a little less than half of one per cent of all federal program spending for this year.
But times are tight. The future is a place where we can dream. So the dollars flow more freely in later years. In 2021-22, the budget’s fifth planning year, new spending peaks at $8.2 billion. Which will be about 2.4 per cent of all program spending.
This will seem a strange word to use for numbers beginning with a “b,” but this level of new spending is peanuts. Last year’s budget announced $14.9 billion in new spending for this year — more than 11 times what this year’s budget provides. I think three things are going on here. First, last year’s budget happened. We are still living in its fiscal world. The aggressive growth track for spending that the Trudeau-Morneau team’s rookie budget laid out is still in place. That budget, so long ago, a whole year ago — written in an age of Barack Obama and a united Europe, amid countless optimistic consultations with Canadians who could, in that more innocent age, still dream of electoral reform — spent all the money that will ever be available to any future government anywhere, including perhaps in Asia and on the moon.
If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality, this year’s Justin Trudeau is a Liberal whose wallet has been stolen by last year’s Trudeau.
Second, last year happened. Outside Canada, the age of Obama and Europe became the age of Trump and who-knows-what. Within our shores, the consultations are done and the work lies ahead. The news has not all been catastrophic, but little of it has been inspiring. So this latest document is the handiwork of a chastened government. If last year’s budget was painted in lusty arm’s-length strokes with a roller — Reconciliation! Innovation! Building! — this year’s is calligraphy. Under the heading “Innovating to Solve Canada’s Big Challenges,” actual spending is $83 million. Over five years. Who knew Canada’s big challenges would be such pushovers?
Third, the current government seems less interested than its predecessors in budgets in general. To some extent this is a healthy change.
A history lesson. When Jean Chrétien was prime minister, almost an entire year’s governmental business would get folded into each budget. These were often given a single top-line theme — killing deficits in 1995, innovation a few years later, tax relief after that, and so on. The rest of the year was devoted to implementing the bold projects that had already been announced in the budget. Stephen Harper largely followed this template, although being Harper, he liked to tuck much of the real business into budget implementation bills that would receive less scrutiny from pesky reporters.
Trudeau and Morneau are not sure why they should have only one fun day a year. So this budget is a list of decisions to be made later. If you’re wondering what a federal infrastructure bank will look like or do, keep wondering. On military spending, the suspense continues. There is promising language on finding redundant or useless old programs to cut, but if you want to know which programs those might be — or even which departments house those programs — the budget offers no help. The constant-consultation government of 2016 has become the constant-process government of 2017.
I’m aware that this column offers little substance. But I’m stuck with the material. One example: armies of academics in U.S. universities, shaken by the election of Trump and uncertain, simply as a practical matter, that they’ll be able to travel or hire research assistants from some countries, are considering their options. What’s on offer? “Approximately 25 Canada 150 Research Chairs will be created to attract top-tier international scholars and researchers to Canada and enhance Canada’s reputation as a global centre for innovation,” the budget says. Twenty-five? That’s . . . not a lot. But it’s a gesture. How will Morneau pay for it? With money “funded with resources within the existing Canada Excellence Research Chairs program.”
Ah. So the new research chairs will be funded with money from the old research chair program. That’s . . . innovative. When Morneau speaks freely, a phenomenon as rare as eclipses, he says you don’t build the kind of society that attracts highly mobile knowledge workers with a single program, but with everything a government does: safe communities, vibrant culture, tolerance of diversity, yadda yadda. This is not untrue. If you liked last year’s budget, you should like this one, because it barely musses its predecessor’s hair.