When the Conservatives won an expanded government just three months ago, they probably felt entitled to as fiscally conservative a budget as they liked. Not so.
The scene in the House on the 27th will be positively surreal: a largely sedated Cabinet listening to a respected colleague—a former minister in Mike Harris’ provincial government—announce program after program with the bow of stimulus on top. In his wildest dreams, Paul Martin wouldn’t have spent this much uncollected taxpayer money. Stephen Harper may have to glare at certain Tories to get them to applaud their own budget.
The NDP reaction will be even more confounding. Jack Layton has spent his entire career trying to get a budget like this passed—he even expropriated Ralph Goodale’s finance department to try and write one himself. Yet he has all but publicly declared that the NDP will oppose the budget. Even with his reputation as the king of fake outrage and contrived anger, this will be a tough sell.
Since the Bloc’s economic policies (inasmuch as they exist) could never be implemented even theoretically except as part of a coalition, their response is predictable. The Bloc will want more for Quebec, as they have with every single budget since their inception. Whether the amount is $2 billion, or $5 billion, or $10 billion, one thing is certain: it will not be enough to appease the separatists, ou sovereigntists if you insist, because Parliament Hill’s resident whiners-in-chief need work to do.
And as for the Liberals, I’m sure that some of them bristle at the notion of supporting any Harper budget after what they perceive as a hatchet job on their former leader and his coalition. Yet no one forced Dion, a noted federalist, to create an (almost certainly abandoned) alliance, allowing separatists to “take control of the administration of the federal state” and “create a mechanism of permanent consultation empowering the Bloc Quebecois on every question of importance, notably concerning the adoption of the federal budget.” Fortunately given the current state of the Liberal party, any outrage over a budget that could easily be their own will be muted.
But as Andrew Coyne noted in Maclean’s, there is one thing Harper could do to make all this fake outrage very, very real. The new budget will contain billions of dollars for industries that desperately need it—industries that employ tens of thousands of small-l liberal voters in swing ridings in Southern Ontario. Industries that didn’t need the money during the election campaign, but need it now. This will be the mother of all election budgets: spending will be spread over a huge swath of Canadian society. As a partisan Conservative, I think Harper should include the party funding cuts that set the whole coalition gong show in motion a month ago. Imagine the Liberal Party trying to fight an election over its own finances, while the constituencies that elected Liberals starve for the federal dollars promised to them in the defeated budget.
