The missing budget

Nor does anyone seem to remember the importance of a national economy, which is strange, considering that up until the Christmas break, the current government had been campaigning on its expertise in managing the economy.

It is even stranger that the Opposition parties also seem to have forgotten about the economy, even though voters will always rank it as either the first or second most important issue in just every public opinion poll.

It is as if all parties have decided it is just too darn difficult to deal with the economy, so they have retreated into the Ottawa bubble to argue about niqabs, terrorists under the bed and new security laws that weren’t necessary after 9/11 but now are.

Last autumn, the federal government couldn’t say enough about how it was helping hard-working families and small businesses with tax cuts. But then, the government’s economic plan headed south.

First, the parliamentary budget officer concluded that the stimulus initiatives hatched by the Harper government were not what they were cracked up to be by the government.

Then, the price of oil tanked.

In mid-January, Joe Oliver discovered that he was the first federal finance minister to have to deal with economic uncertainty and delayed the budget until April at the earliest. Falling oil prices were creating a high degree of uncertainty, Oliver said then, and he needed more time to recrunch the numbers.

More likely, the reason behind the delay was that the government had this politically salable plan to reward targeted voters while balancing the budget, only to watch that plan circle the drain together with oil prices.

There doesn’t appear to be any contingency plan, other than to make the fight against terrorism the national priority and change the narrative enough to make people forget about all those election goodies that had been promised.

The U.S. economic recovery doesn’t seem to have affected Canada much. The Bank of Canada shocked us all by cutting its key interest rate by 25 basis points – a strong signal that the central bank is worried.

But, no matter. The national narrative is now about Terrorism – with a capital T – something that attests to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s uncanny ability to control the public agenda and alter it at will. (While we were all arguing about terrorism and Bill C-51, the government tabled its spending estimates for the next fiscal year in early March. They passed.)

There is no law that says the federal government must table a budget in order to continue operating, just as the government no longer needs the approval of Parliament to borrow money.

Should the federal government fail to produce a budget this year, the current government wouldn’t be the first. In 2002, the Liberals were too busy with a civil war between supporters of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin to get around to a budget.

According to the latest signals from Oliver, the earliest we can expect a federal budget is late April or early May. But, why bother?

Most people regard last November’s economic statement, when the Tories handed out pre-election goodies in Vaughan, Ont., just north of Toronto, to be the real budget for 2015. In fact, many of us believe the prime minister would be happy to call a snap spring election without a budget if he thought conditions were right.

If the federal government does table a budget, we can expect it to be a bland mélange of platitudes and talking points to make people forget how the Tories misread the economic conditions so badly in November.

Until 2006, the budget was an established convention in which the government of the day laid out a documented plan for economic growth. Now, the budget is just another political document.

If there ever was a time for a documented and clear plan for growth, this is it. But now that the convention of an annual budget has been broken, can it be repaired?

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