There’s only way to make a Canadian Federal budget exciting, and that’s to read Andrew Coyne’s inevitable diatribe concerning it’s existential threat to national solvency. After the government became born-again Keynesians with January 2009’s budget, Coyne himself said his prayers for conservatism. So instead of a shocking betrayal of the ideals he supports, Coyne interprets what happened Thursday as the descent of those ideas into oblivion. For him there aren’t many smiles to be had right now.
Despite this entertaining flogging, what interested me more than the ideological perspective was a note of consensus I recognized along both the left and the right, specifically between Coyne’s writing and Progressive Economist Erin Weir’s take. Both used words such as “empty”, “recycled”, “flippant”, and a “whimper”, and bore less anger than contempt and disappointment. While there were certainly major differences in opinion, both sides agreed that the budget generally lacked direction.
Erin, ever the progressive, ran through his list of social issues the budget in no particular way attempts to tackle, such as poverty and the environment. He goes further to take note of the fact that the rich will be the major beneficiaries of a lowered corporate tax rate, and that environmental erosion will be a probable consequence of policy declarations such as these:
The Government is taking steps in Budget 2010 to further improve the regulatory review process for large energy projects. Responsibility for conducting environmental assessments for energy projects will be delegated from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency to the National Energy Board and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission for projects falling under their respective areas of expertise.
Coyne’s lengthy rant a year ago disparaged the scattered approach to spending that in his estimation also drived, practically speaking, at nothing in particular.
What if Right-Wingers are wrong in worrying about how much governments are spending as opposed to worrying about on what governments are spending? And what if Left-Wingers are foolish in believing that the state can take on every one social injustice under the sun with one budget? If so, then Stephen Harper back in 2009 could have carved his own path by committing the government to a smaller number of more demanding projects.
Instead of splitting the money up for infrastructure, tourism, EI and the like, the Canadian government could for example focus all it’s energies in finding a source of energy alternative to oil. A move like that would certainly get money out in the hands of people and invite foreign investment, but it might also transform Canada into the global authority on future sources of energy. Lefties will be put on the spot to support the greenness of it all, and Andrew Coyne might be able to keep his rhetoric in check if he knew that Federal spending had a point.
That is, unless the Tories are planning to use blandness to rocket out of statistical deadlock at the polls.
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