Author:
RON LAMBERT per Joe Hueglin
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Date Posted: 10:33:14 02/19/03 Wed
Author Host/IP: d150-99-156.home.cgocable.net/24.150.99.156
Editorial - The power to spend
Wednesday, February 19th, 2003
Finance Minister John Manley yesterday applied the federal grease gun to a long list of squeaky wheels. The list of modest spending increases and tax cuts announced in his budget did not add up to a strategy for Canada. Rather, it revealed a politically sensitive government anxious to allocate tokens of budgetary recognition to many claimants and take the edge off their complaints.
Each token is so small, however, that none will make a visible difference to Canada. The armed forces will still be on short rations. Health care will still be given in hospital corridors. Urban infrastructure will still decay. Air passengers will still pay for security measures even in remote northern airports where there are no security measures. Workers and employers will still pay a payroll tax unrelated to the actual cost of employment insurance benefits.
In these and other programs, Mr. Manley responded to grievances laid before him. In none of these measures did he focus sufficient governmental effort to suggest that the terrorist age, the post-Enron age, the age of Nortel's recovery and the age of the retiring baby boomers may be different from previous times, requiring new priorities and new leadership from government.
Mr. Manley assumes that Canada will enjoy robust growth in each of the next three years. He assumes that the U.S. will catch up with Canada's robust growth and will not drag this country into the economic weakness where the U.S. has recently been stagnating. He has built a spending program on that optimistic assumption. After the customary annual provisions for contingencies and prudence, he will spend every cent his forecasts give him. He will not use the good times he forecasts to reduce debt as a governm ent should do during the expansion phase of the economic cycle.
This budget seems to be dictated by the electoral cycle and not by the economic cycle. The surplus will be spent and the complainers gratified during this third year of the Liberals' term to pave the way for a 2004 election. The prime minister elected then will discover the bare cupboard, throw up his hands in despair and impose the spending discipline Mr. Manley did not establish in this budget.
A government with a backbone could have decided that Canada needs well-equipped and well-trained armed forces more than it needs regional development funds for regional ministers to sprinkle among their clients. It could have decided that employment insurance premiums should be segregated from other funds and matched to the cost of the insurance benefits. It could have organized a distinct, accountable fund for air transport security to show that the charges actually do buy the purported results.
For want of backbone, this government has merely responded to the loudest complaints. This can be a good method for assuring a political party's survival and its continuance in office. For the country, however, it assures that choices will be deferred or never made and that the government never distinguishes the petty annoyances from the fatal diseases, the pimples from the cancers.
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