What should be in the budget?

On Thursday, the Green Party released our proposals for a stimulus package, highlighting the importance of following Barack Obama’s lead in moving the North American economy to a green energy future.  His plan boasts $150 billion over five years for green energy to create five million jobs. It is focused on energy efficiency as a top priority, planning to save as much oil in ten years as the US imports from Venezuela and the Middle East.  I have noted with some surprise that President Obama has started dropping the qualifier “foreign” when he talks about the need to decrease US dependence on oil.  I first made note of the fact that he referenced the threat of a warming planet and the need to get the US off oil, as he embarked on his whistle stop trip from Chicago to Washington, D.C.  The media has not seemed to pick up on it.  It is good news for the planet and bad news for Mr. Harper’s efforts to ensure the US market will continue to demand ever increasing volumes of Athabasca tar sands crude. 

The Green Party plan also calls for investments in the arts, in student and youth programmes and apprenticeships, for health care and municipal infrastructure.  Our most important message is that spending to kick-start the economy must be weighed against sensible criteria.  The investments must make sense as job creators, move us to a low-carbon future, and the deficit must not create long term (or “structural” deficits).

It would have been great to be able to project our bottom line if we were government, but we, like the other Opposition Parties, are sabotaged in that effort by not having the real numbers from the government.  Recall that in November, Flaherty was projecting narrow (razor thin) surpluses for the next five years.  Virtually no one believed those numbers.  To get there they had to “cook the books” with the sale of assets (unnamed) and billions added to the revenue side for the hypothetical sales.  And in the debates I was the only leader to be totally honest and see the economic downturn as severe and creating the potential for budget deficits.

Now the Harper government has broken with our parliamentary tradition of budget secrecy to get the big shock items out of the way before the House even re-opens.  We hear there will be a $64 billion deficit in the next two years.  What is not revealed is how much of that deficit is due to the wanted stimulus package and how much is inevitable given the appalling economic mis-management of Harper’s government.  Cutting the GST while increasing government spending eliminated all of the surpluses of the last ten years had landed us in the soup.  We were headed for deficits and a recession ahead of the U.S. because of the lousy economic management of the current government.

We will get the details on Tuesday, but the critical test for the Harper government is two-fold.  Has it delivered the budget the economy, unemployed Canadians and struggling businesses need, or has the Harper government once again, put partisan and ideological goals ahead of the public interest? The signs are worrying.  So far support has been announced for the Mackenzie gas pipeline, as though that is infrastructure.  A memo has been leaked pointing to plans to gut the Environmental Assessment process, using the economic downturn as an excuse. Similarly there are plans to slash the protections created through the Navigable Waters Protection Act.  Attacking environmental regulations as part of a stimulus package is outrageous.  It will not help the economy and it will further compromise environmental protection. 

There is no chance the new Administration south of the border would try such a stunt.  They just elected “hope and change” and said good-bye to George W.  Did anyone see where that helicopter landed?  Is W. helping write Canada’s budget?