The government tabled its 2015 omnibus budget bill, C-59, on May 7. At 153 pages, it’s a pale shadow of previous budget bills (2010 budget, 1,056 pages; 2011 budget, 716 pages; 2012 budget, 882 pages; 2013 budget, 450 pages; 2014 budget, 858 pages).
For the government, of course, the bills are only as long as they need to be; the point is to package politically popular measures together with poison pills, the better to corner the opposition into voting against them. And so, the government tables budget bills shot through with measures that have nothing remotely to do with the budget.
By their very nature such bills are immune to meaningful Parliamentary scrutiny, discussion and debate — they’re hot messes, designed to be that way. They’re built not only to prevent Parliament from doing what it’s designed to do, but to discredit the institution itself.
As in previous budget bills, the 2015 bill contains measures that the Opposition can support — expanding benefits and services for veterans and their families, reducing the small business tax rate. It also includes retroactive legislation to protect the RCMP from possible criminal charges with respect to the destruction of data under the Access to Information Act. No Opposition MP can support a bill that retroactively absolves the RCMP — or anyone else — of breaking the law. So they’ll vote against it — and the Conservatives will spend the coming election campaign telling voters that New Democrats and Liberals didn’t support better services for veterans.
Parliament normally recesses in mid-June, meaning there may be just 15 days for committee review of C-59 by the Commons and the Senate. The government will use every trick in the book to ensure that C-59 receives Royal Assent before the summer recess, including time allocation and closure.
Talking of budgets: The centrepiece of the Harper government’s fiscal message in 2015 is how it brought the budget back into balance after seven years of trying. The budget was delayed until April 21; Finance Minister Joe Oliver, fooling nobody, said he needed the extra time to study the impact of the oil price collapse on federal finances. What he actually needed — and what he delayed the budget in order to exploit — was the sale of the government’s shares in General Motors (net $0.9 billion) and changes to federal employees’ sick leave entitlements ($0.9 billion) in 2015-16.
Without those two measures, the budget would not be in balance. It isn’t really in balance now; the structural imbalance is still there. The GM sale and the the sick leave measure served to cover over the cracks in the federal government’s fiscal performance like a thin coat of paint on a rusty used car. Under the Conservatives, the federal debt has increased by $150 billion.
Which points up the problem with the Harper government’s other great fiscal legacy gesture — its so-called Balanced Budget Act, contained in the fine print of C-59. In the 2013 throne speech the government vowed the bill would “require balanced budgets in normal economic times and concrete timelines in returning to balance in the event of an economic crisis”.
Under the BBA, if the minister of Finance projects a deficit, he or she must appear before the House of Commons Finance Committee within the first 30 days of a Commons sitting to explain why, and to offer a plan to return to balanced budgets. (Which doesn’t explain why a minister of Finance isn’t expected to appear before the committee to defend every budget … but let’s not get sidetracked.)
The BBA says that if a deficit is due to a recession — defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth in real gross domestic product — or to “extraordinary events” (like natural disaster or war) that cost the government more than $3 billion, then the operating budgets of departments and agencies would be frozen automatically to pay for any wage increases. The pay of the prime minister, cabinet members and deputy ministers would be frozen as well. These measures would stay in effect until the budget returns to balance.
If the deficit is due to factors other than those listed above, operating budgets would again be frozen, and the salaries of the PM, cabinet ministers and their deputies would be cut by five per cent.
When departments and agencies were denied compensation for wage increases in November 2013, it saved the government a whopping $550 million annually — enough to have only a marginal impact on eliminating the deficit.
In other words, the BBA won’t take a budget that’s out of balance and put it back into balance. It can’t — not on its own. It’s purely a symbolic measure, one that might prevent governments from taking measures to shorten the duration of a recession (such as a stimulus program) while doing next to nothing for the bottom line.
A balanced budget law can’t repeal the laws of economics. It can’t make two plus two equal five. Balanced budgets are the product of political will, nothing more or less. In the absence of that will, deficits accumulate and debt piles up.
But the authors of this law will consider it a ‘success’ even if it doesn’t balance a single budget. It’s purpose is political — to send a message to the Conservative base that deficits are evil in every circumstance, and that the other parties are straining at the leash to run deficits because they wouldn’t support a ‘balanced budget law’ that happens to be part of an omnibus bill that includes a section retroactively shielding the RCMP from charges.
It’s a lie — concealed within a larger one.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Scott Clark and Peter DeVries
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