The Canadian federal budget arrived with the usual thud. It seems they just can’t help themselves.
A number of commentators have already complained that instead of a brief, dry, factual explanation of the current government balance sheet and the ministry’s unrealistic expectations for it, it contains hundreds of pages of soothing bumf about good intentions and projections whose relevance is as suspect as their accuracy. Which has been the case for decades because everything is now a campaign speech. So let me quickly endorse that complaint, then move on.
Specifically, to having laughed out loud at an April 11 National Post headline, “Budget’s health transfers disappoint provinces.” I know we’re meant to recycle paper but not this way. And I laughed even harder when that story revealed not only that the feds no longer bother giving their provincial counterparts budget briefings beforehand, but that the chair of the Council of the Federation (only in Canada, folks), B.C.’s socialist premier John Horgan, complained that by failing to increase the federal share of health costs from 22 percent to 35 percent, “The federal budget missed an opportunity to address the major health care challenges facing Canadians.”
If so, one is tempted to retort, your federal NDP counterparts got a lousy bargain for supporting the Trudeau Liberals until the interest payments come home. But the main point is that Horgan apparently remains convinced that (a) the problems in health care are static not dynamic, (b) the federal government gets tax money from some place other than the same taxpayers his own government milks, and (c) democracy and efficiency are enhanced by blurring accountability and responsibility between different levels of government.
As I say, they just can’t help themselves. Just as many people cannot help believing any attribution they read online despite Lincoln’s prophetic telegraph-era maxim, “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it.” Which I interject because of Einstein’s famous “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” That one even got a cosmic makeover as “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” And his “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” is similar both in meaning and in being wrongly attributed to the famous physicist.
Sadly, it does not make us smarter to misquote somebody smarter than ourselves. But arguably he should have said it even if, once a man has said “E = mc squared,” he’s kind of off the hook for new and important observations. But his non-maxim applies here. To the stuff I just complained about and a bunch I didn’t, like the magic conviction that if you run big deficits they will go away, and the iron pledge to decrease the debt-to-GDP ratio which dependably means the reverse will happen.
For all that, what stuck in my already obstructed craw was this ludicrous proposal to fix our sluggish and overburdened economy by piling on more taxes and regulations. Despite her condescending tone, there is real value in the finance minister’s admission that our lagging productivity “is a well-known problem and an insidious one. It is time for Canada to tackle it.” Even if she’s been in power for seven years, so what’s the holdup? But a $15 billion Canada Growth Fund to encourage clever inventions would have Einstein rotating in his grave relative to the fiscal situation at sufficient velocity to experience major mass gain had he actually taken time off to say the things quoted above.
I don’t know why politicians feel obliged nowadays to say their bold leadership consists of doing stuff everybody agrees on. As in Freeland’s “Canadians understand that post COVID, our country needs a growth strategy.” Or to play buzzword bingo. What has “post COVID” to do with it, especially if the problem is well known, long-standing, and insidious?
Then there’s “We need to pay down our COVID debts and in a very uncertain 21st century, Canada really needs an economic plan that is going to allow us to increase our productivity to increase our economic growth.” What a pompous parade of words leading nowhere. Especially, again, from a regime now as long in the tooth as the debit ledger.
Actually, what Canada needs is less government. Less borrowing. Less taxation. Less inflation. Less regulation. Less nonsense about politicians telling entrepreneurs how to innovate. So for starters we could have plunked that $15 billion right onto our “COVID debts” if insanity did not mean thinking the solution to too much government is more government.
Too much government spending? Lavish new programs. Too much government meddling? Investment strategy. Too much government arrogance? Aim higher. I mean, it’s gotta work eventually, right?
They just can’t help themselves.
