The federal government will find it extremely hard to put the brakes on federal spending. Through the past few decades the rolling snowball has just got too big. The run-away-train has picked up speed and momentum.
But, sensing it is losing its base of support among fiscal conservatives, the Harper government presented its rose-coloured forecast that will have our federal budget balanced in the next five years. The spending restraint, outlined in the 2010 budget, would net $17.6-billion in savings over five years and bring the deficit down from a high of $53.8-billion this fiscal year, ending March 31, to a low of $1.8-billion by 2015.
However, as Don Martin of the National Post suggests, this is really not that much given the increases through the Harper era – and the reality that they will continue to spend this year and most of their proposed cuts will likely be implemented after the election.
After four Conservative years of steady 7% increases to the bottom line, which have swallowed the Liberal surplus and swamped the books in an all-time high tide of red ink, restraint finally entered the government’s vocabulary as it sets out to find $17.6-billion in savings over the next five years. Now, slamming into reverse thrust from full throttle could rip out an engine, so they didn’t make the shift without one final $2.2-billion spurt of niche handouts for every pet Conservative cause ranging from gold-medal athletics to crime victims, war veterans and residential school survivors.
But the narrative behind this 451-page opus (are those guys in finance paid by the word?) is that of a final spending binge before the hangover hits. In a sense it’s more like a brace-yourself budget because so much detail is left to the imagination, no doubt because specifics are best deferred until after the next election.
Read Martin’s full accounting here:
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/politics/story.html?id=2644247
Now, the success of this plan depends directly on how successful the government is in making the necessary cuts to the public sector. In fact, the bureaucracy is the single biggest target in the Conservative government’s new restraint package. PM Harper, with his hatchet-man at Treasury Board Stockwell Day intend on enacting the first across-the-board restrictions on departmental spending in more than a decade. The results could lead to a two-year wage freeze for up to 419,000 federal civil servants.
It would seem reasonable to think in this time of economic uncertainty that the federal government would tighten their own belts. And, given this Conservative budget, there are signs that the federal politicos may be making some gestures in this direction. However, the top federal public sector union, representing a great many of the faceless bureaucrats hidden away in the office towers of the nation’s Capital, says that the government will be in for a fight if public civil servants are expected to pay with salary freezes or job loses. It’s a case of the federal union screaming to the Canadian peons (read: average taxpayers): “Let them eat cake!”
“They’ve throw down the gauntlet,” said Public Service Alliance president John Gordon, who represents 165,000 federal employees. “Our members are up for the challenge and they’re going to be standing up and saying ‘This is wrong.’ ”
SOURCE:
As an important aside, Canadians should be aware there are the haves (those in the public sector) and the have nots (those outside looking in). Consider government employees earn 17.3% more than their equivalent private sector counterparts. The disparity in pay becomes more alarming when one considers the generous pensions Canadian taxpayers are on the hook for. The majority of retired civil servants are worry-free: 80% of public sector workers have pensions compare to 23% in the private sector.
So, it is as we have lamented many times, big government creates big headaches. It is very difficult to rein in government programs and spending with a culture of bureaucratic entitlement. I’m reminded of the old Arabic adage that states, “If you let the nose of the camel into the tent, you will soon find that you must sleep with it.”
Post a Comment