So now we know the inspiration behind Chrystia Freeland鈥檚 insipid budget update. sa国际传媒鈥檚 finance minister, it appears, has been channelling Peter Sellers in the movie Being There.
Playing a simple-minded gardener in Washington, D.C., who knows nothing of the real world, Sellers gets taken in as a house guest after a rich woman runs him over in the street.
She asks him his name. He replies 鈥淐hance the gardener.鈥� She mishears that as Chauncey Gardner.
Believing Chauncey a far-seeing savant whose cryptic statements disguise deep-seated wisdom, she asks him his views for the future. He replies: 鈥淚n the garden, growth has its seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.鈥�
On the basis of such empty vacuities, he becomes an adviser to the president.
Cue Freeland, explaining her fiscal strategy: 鈥淲e know the winter ahead will be hard. But we also know that spring will follow winter.鈥�
And that鈥檚 about it by way of a forecast. Though Freeland did concede the deficit will top $380 billion this year.
In passing, that鈥檚 more than the entire 颅federal budget planned for 2020 before COVID-19 struck. It鈥檚 like running up credit card bills worth more than your annual income. Indeed, it鈥檚 close to the deficits we ran during the Second World War (adjusted for inflation). Except on that occasion, we fought a five-year war and suffered 45,000 military deaths.
Freeland also admitted she had no clue how to retire such a deficit. Instead, she segued to standard Liberal party nostrums about expanding child care support, creating more affordable housing and building a 鈥渃leaner, greener economy.鈥�
In a laughably partisan piece intended to provide a fig leaf for Freeland鈥檚 discomfiture, the CBC website assured readers that Erin O鈥橳oole had nothing more concrete to say. Why should he?
No doubt the Conservative leader had in mind Napoleon鈥檚 maxim (suitably corrected for gender): 鈥淣ever interfere with an opponent when she is in the process of destroying herself.鈥�
Now a confession is owed here. I was once, some years apart, the chief budget officer for two provinces, Saskatchewan and British Columbia.
Yet if you made me sa国际传媒鈥檚 budget supremo for a day with unlimited powers, I could not tell you how to fix this mess.
What I would suggest is that we stop 颅making it worse.
We can鈥檛 afford a national child care plan, or a national pharmacare plan or a national long-term care plan. And we sure as hell can鈥檛 afford greening the economy. For a country reliant on the export of resource-based products, that is the equivalent of suicide.
We need Freeland and her colleagues to get some hard truths into their heads. The dreamy days of 2015, when the federal budget was in surplus, are over.
The tireless efforts of former finance minister Jim Flaherty, who worked himself to death rebalancing the budget after the 2008 recession, are for nothing. All that is gone, gone with the wind.
Freeland may reply: 鈥淔rankly my dear, I don鈥檛 give a damn.鈥� But we鈥檙e talking here about nothing less than the future of our country.
What we need now is a resolve to get on with rebuilding the economy. Nothing else matters.
No more pandering. No more pet projects. No more virtue signalling and airy schemes.
Just hard, unrelenting work to recover from the worst natural disaster of our time.
