The true purpose of the grandiose 2003 budget is to make the federal government once again the only government that matters. You will pay heavily for its ambitions.
After almost a decade of retrenchment, abandonment and withdrawal, Ottawa has come charging back, throwing around — and away — your money in ways not seen since the heady days of Pearsonian Liberalism and Trudeaumania. This budget represents a massive transfer of wealth from richer to poorer, from private to public, in the interests of a more egalitarian society. In the process, it aims to forcibly diminish the relevance of the provincial governments.
In this, Finance Minister John Manley's budget has probably succeeded. But in making the average taxpayer's life easier, his job safer, her future more secure, it has largely failed.
You've probably already heard about the big-ticket items officially unveiled Tuesday: in health care, defence, child care and the environment.
However, it is not just the size, but the plethora, of new spending commitments that reveals the true ubiquity of the budget's expansionism. Money flows into every nook and cranny of federal responsibility. There's a new $1,600 benefit for low-income families with disabled children, and another $320-million to provide rental housing for poor families. There's $10-million to help restore heritage buildings; $115-million for bilingualism training and services; $17-million more for Katimavik (did you know there was still a Katimavik?); $77-million in direct new funding for aboriginal programs; $10-million for athletes if Vancouver wins the 2010 Olympics.
It is the sort of budget you would have expected to find just before an election circa 1974. Except this isn't 1974 and there is no election pending. There is only a Prime Minister determined to recreate the government he grew up inside, a green and golden government he remembers through an autumnal haze of nostalgia.
For much of the past decade, the Liberal government's raison d'être was to bring fiscal responsibility to federal spending. Government, then-finance-minister Paul Martin proclaimed, was living beyond its means, and living wastefully at that. Ottawa needed to reduce, recycle, reuse. The message appeared popular. How popular? It gave the Liberals two more majority governments.
But this was not, it appears, the message the Liberals ever actually wanted to send. Circumstances had dictated prudence, but prudence was never an end in itself. Redistribution of wealth, as much as possible and in as many ways as possible, was what the Chrétien government always wanted to be about. It had just never had the chance.
Not only is Ottawa spending in ways it hasn't spent since the days of deficits, it has finally learned how to sell itself. In the old high-rolling days of executive federalism, the feds talked the provincial governments into shared-cost programs, then sent them the money, letting them take all the credit for the new hospitals and highways. In the dark days of the last decade, it stopped sending much of the money, leaving the provinces to manage health care, education, welfare and urban affairs largely on their own.
But that's all history. Building the Canada We Want, as the budget calls itself, contains $5-billion in new spending initiatives in the coming fiscal year, and $6-billion the year after (although the government promises to partly offset this with $1-billion a year in unspecified savings).
Although the budget declines to forecast in detail after 2004/05, many of the largest spending commitments don't kick in until after that, guaranteeing that federal government spending will continue to escalate year after year.
And no longer will the money flow anonymously into provincial coffers. Many of the new federal initiatives involve direct transfers, with the provincial governments left watching as Ottawa intrudes into their jurisdictions with scholarships and grants for students and faculty, subsidies to families on welfare, and a health accord that essentially federalizes responsibility for overseeing the health-care system.
And you can bet that whatever services the provincial governments provide with new federal help — daycare spaces, say, or public transit — will be festooned with that Canada-with-a-flag-flying-from-the-d logo.
This country brought to you by the Government of Canada.
Unless you are among the fragile of our society, there is little for you in this document. An expanded RSP limit (for those with enough spare cash to max out already), a slight reduction in Employment Insurance premiums, and that's about it. But only the most dedicated social activist could decry as inadequate the massive federal spending on low-income Canadians, paid for by everybody else.
That's fine, the middle class might say. We've already had our tax cut, it's time for the less fortunate to sup at the federal table. Except our American cousins are cutting their taxes further, while we fail to cut ours. Their research and development is driven by the market (and, granted, the military), while our federal government risks billions on investments in unproven green technologies.
This is an activist budget by a federal government determined to return to the vintage Liberal tradition of redistributing wealth from richer to poorer, of social engineering by Ottawa bureaucrats, of a government-manufactured social order, in the interests of a more just society. That similar experiments largely failed in the past means naught.
But then, this is a document that looks backward, not forward. The truism is that Jean Chrétien seeks to create a legacy. The truth is that he seeks to recreate his youth.
