Let’s show a little fiscal restraint here

The first signs of what was to come appeared in the Globe the previous week. “Public sector layoffs may be the tip of the iceberg,” teased the headline, leaving the story to convey the grim news: “The federal government’s bid to curb spending amid a multi-billion-dollar fiscal shortfall has delivered some of its first job casualties of the year.” Brace yourself, it gets worse. “Five curators at the country’s pre-eminent art gallery have been given layoff notices, while about 50 Environment Canada term employees, including scientists and scientific support staff, have been told they’ll no longer have jobs by the end of the month.”

OH MY GOD, they’ve—wait, what? Five curators? Fifty Environment Canada employees? Nobody likes to see anybody lose their job, but how exactly is this evidence of a bid to curb anything? Some perspective: the federal public service, not counting uniformed military or police, employs more than 280,000 people. That’s an increase of about 33,000 since the Tories took power in 2006. Those unfortunate gallery curators and weather forecasters make up about one-sixth of one per cent of the extra employees the government has taken on over the last five years. If this is the “tip of the iceberg,” and if, as every schoolboy knows, four-fifths of an iceberg is below the surface, then we can look forward to reductions in the public service roughly equivalent to about two weeks’ worth of new hires.

Nevertheless, when at last it was “revealed” that the federal government would, as it said it would in its first attempt back in March, and as it repeated it would every day of the election campaign, cut $4 billion out of federal spending by fiscal 2015, well, you could knock us over with a feather. “Budget on the table, public service on the chopping block,” the Globe told readers the next day, while the Star screamed: “Cuts loom as Harper vows to slay deficit.” It would be, the Globe story said, “the most aggressive period of government restraint since the mid-1990s.” Which is fair enough, since it would be the only period of government restraint in that time: since 2000, spending has more than doubled.

Well, unless you count the period of restraint that happened toward the end of last year, when spending mysteriously dropped $4 billion below forecast. That’s right. As recently as the March budget, program spending for fiscal 2011, the year just passed, was projected to come in at $245 billion, yet here we are three months later, and it comes in at “only” $241 billion. So the target to be achieved four years out by the grandly named Strategic and Operating Review might well be achieved by September, for all we know, just through forecast error.

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Source: Macleans