Dear Diary...

I always feel like starting a blog after a long dry spell, “Dear Diary, Sorry it has been so long since I wrote.” I had a wonderful vacation with my daughter between the 19th and 29th of February. Many thanks to Deputy Leader Adriane Carr, Finance Critic Peter Graham and Toronto Centre by-election candidate Chris Tindal for pinch-hitting and covering the budget release. Adriane was right on. That was a budget from a government, like ostriches with heads stuck in the tar sands. We knew it would not include a real climate plan or even use the word “Kyoto” and it didn’t. But it was worse in its details than in its broad strokes. I have spent much of the last week, while in transit to campaign events, speaking at universities -- Harvard, Acadia, University of Toronto and St. Francis Xavier (yes, all in one week) -- lugging around the 416 pages of the 2008 federal budget. Not light reading. And a poor choice for bedtime reading. Bedtime reading should be relaxing and pleasant. No past budget was a “good read.” I have been reading budgets and paying attention to their details for years. But this is the first budget I have read that made me wonder where my country had gone. It is all about building more jails, protecting the perimeter of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River from terrorists, but not from pollution. It commits to an ever-expanding military budget -- $12 billion over the next 20 years. It sets up permission for recreational areas in national parks to be privatized. Read that again. That is what it says in Annex 3, page 258. Did anyone notice that? It calls $300 million for AECL “environmental” programmes. It commits millions to insert biometric data (Reading irises? Fingerprints?) on the visas of foreign nationals. It commits millions to the Security and Prosperity Partnership. It abandons one of the few good things in last year’s Speech from the Throne -- a new water strategy to clean up our lakes and oceans. Maybe they only meant clean up the terrorists that might jump from a boat on the St Lawrence??? The money for science in water research is much needed. No sign of it. Is there anything good? Yes. The commitment to the gas tax revenue initially put aside for municipal infrastructure initially by Prime Minister Paul Martin as a permanent revenue stream to municipalities. Likely about $2 billion/year. But overall, this budget is about guns, not butter. This budget reads like a tragic-comedy about a man whose house is on fire. He is too busy putting locks and bolts on the door, making sure there is ammunition in the gun under his pillow in case of an intruder, to bother putting out the fire.