Last week's federal budget was probably not a big surprise when the Liberal government decided once again to spend through their windfall revenues rather than working to reduce the deficit. While the size of the deficit would climb a little in the short term, the debt-to-GDP ratio will continue to fall, which is good enough for the party that once prided itself on its fiscal discipline. But while it probably wasn't a big surprise that the Liberals would once again take this particular route, what was perhaps more surprising was how easily the Liberals were able to goad Andrew Scheer into abandoning any substantive criticism of the budget, and it was unprecedented in how he ceded the media field to them on budget day.
If there as any concern that the budget would prove to be a distraction from the ongoing coverage of the Double-Hyphen Affair, that was certainly misplaced. There was plenty of attention paid to the justice committee meeting that day which saw the Liberal members vote to end their look into the allegations around whether or not the PMO was inappropriately pressuring Jody Wilson-Raybould. That meeting even featured a walkout by opposition members to each vent to the media before going back behind closed doors to discuss their workplan. The budget coverage did not detract from that. And certainly, later in the week, the only thing that anyone could talk about was the bombshell interview that Jane Philpott gave to Maclean's, and we're barely talking about the budget at all. If this was going to be the Liberals' attempt to change the channel, it wasn't a success.
Scheer, however, made a series of tactical mistakes over the course of the week that made himself and his party look even less serious on the budget than the Liberals could have hoped for. Justin Trudeau laid an obvious trap for Scheer in Tuesday's Question Period, less than two hours before the budget was to be presented, and stated that Scheer was desperate not to talk about the economy because he had no plan for it. And lo, Scheer did not talk about the economy that day at all. He eschewed going on all of the political shows, who normally block time for him to appear, and after his MPs made enough noise to drown out Bill Morneau's speech, he gave a single brief statement at the microphone in the Foyer to declare that the budget, with its $41 billion in new spending, was "the most expensive cover-up in the history of cover-ups," and that it was "deficit spending today, to cover up a scandal, to be paid for by higher taxes after the election."
Of course, this is both childish and absurd, not to mention poor economics. Considering a budget that has been in the works for months to be a "cover-up" is laughable, and its focus on sprinkling spending around target demographics like Millennials and seniors is naked vote-buying something all parties do in one form or another. The Conservatives spent a decade promising boutique tax credits to every group they were trying to court, most especially suburban families, because that was where the votes they needed were located. Suggesting that the entire federal budget was re-crafted as a giant "look over there" from the ongoing media circus of the Double-Hyphen Affair also betrays a complete lack of understanding of how government works. While he may not have as much of a grasp of that, given that he was Speaker during the previous parliament, when the Conservatives had their majority in the House of Commons, there should have been someone in his office who could have told him that it was a ridiculous sound bite and yet that's what they went with.
As for his oft-repeated line that today's deficits are tomorrow's taxes, well, that's not true either. With interest rates largely below the rate of GDP growth, the small deficits this government is running are not only sustainable, but the declining debt-to-GDP ratio is proof that they don't need to be paid for with future taxes. And using the "that's not how families budget" line is borderline offensive in how juvenile and wrong the comparison is. A country with a trillion-dollar economy is not a household. Federal debt benefits others in the market, including ordinary Canadians who hold bonds as part of their investment portfolios, because they're low-risk. That money isn't lit on fire, and yet, Scheer's jejune fiscal analysis betrays a very real lack of seriousness for a party whose brand is supposed to be all about good fiscal management. And instead of some actual qualitative analysis of the budget and government spending how efficiently it's being used we get these grade-school talking points.
It took Scheer until the weekend, at the Manning Networking Conference, to lay out some of his ideas about how he would balance the budget if he was in power, but again, those ideas were poorly thought out. His promise to eliminate the Canada Infrastructure Bank would mean needing to rebuild another organization like P3 Canada, which the CIB replaced, at the loss of more time, expertise and dollars, not to mention needing to restart yet another rural broadband initiative since the budget was counting on the CIB to leverage private telecom providers to building those networks. Pulling Canada out of the Asian Development Bank? The amount of spending is pretty small and has other benefits for trade and diplomacy for the Chinese market, which he may not be so keen to disrupt if he doesn't want yet another canola crisis on his hands.
The lack of seriousness with which this whole budget exercise has happened on the part of the Conservatives is certainly something that the Liberals will be able to use as a wedge against them given that all signs indicate they're already planning to go hard after him for his unwillingness to denounce white supremacists in the wake of tragedies like that in Christchurch, New Zealand. That we can't have a reasonable budget debate in this country is disappointing, particularly given that we had parties who were supposed to be competing over who would be more fiscally responsible than the other.
