O Canada,
Our home and native land...
In the throne speech, the government - or more accurately, the Prime Minister's Office -- suggested a parliamentary committee might be struck to look into changing the words of our national anthem.
The response was swift and vociferous.
We don't have a problem with our anthem. just the way it is, thank you very much.
Don't mess with it.
Not that surprising a response given the patriotism of the previous two weeks. But it was a story that dominated the news and talk shows for a couple of days.
Indeed, it was a story that captured the news cycles just long enough the government's budget was, well, a "below-the-fold" story.
A cynical person might think the reference to changing the anthem was inserted into the throne speech for just such a purpose.
A smoke screen that would throw everyone off the scent produced by a budget that is odorous.
Recall that the whole reason given for proroguing Parliament before Christmas was to give the government time to focus on the budget.
To marshal the resources to craft a budget that would see the country through the present financial crisis.
Two months and what did we get? More of the same. Hold the course.
Stick to the "Action Plan". Two months with no Parliamentary interference and the best the government could do was to say "we can't think of what else to do but keep going."
In his budget speech, Finance Minister Flaherty did make 29 references to jobs. "Business" was also prominent. As were words like "new" and "global".
Not surprising as the government seems to think that addressing the global financial crisis involves business creating new jobs.
The problem is the government really has no idea of how to make this happen. Indeed, no government really has a good idea of how to make this happen. If governments did, we wouldn't have unemployment in the first place.
More to the point, maybe, is that the Conservatives have a belief that the key to going forward is to keep with the economic program that got us into trouble in the first place.
Succinctly put, it is "reduce taxes, reduce the size of government, shift the cost load to the consumer."
The flaw with this approach is that eventually you want to do something that requires collective action -- such as address a financial crisis.
But smaller government and lower taxes mean that you don't have the money to do it. And the very people that you shifted the burden to -- the working population -- don't have the resources to help themselves.
As a government, your only choice -- if you are to keep the ideological faith -- is to run deficits. Massive deficits.
A total of $53.8 billion projected for the year just past (the actual numbers aren't in yet...) and some $102 billion or so over the next five years.
Think about that. In the space of six years, the present economic path will see us add on approximately $155 billion in national debt.
Where are those debt clocks now?
The government's strategy depends upon business creating jobs.
If that doesn't happen, things are going to be much worse.
Deficits will be higher. Debt will balloon. And we will be a long time in recovering.
This is not to say that creating jobs is not a good thing. I agree wholeheartedly that creating jobs is what we need to do going forward.
But I would argue the government has missed the boat in a big way.
We are at a crossroads. We can keep being a country with vast raw resources which we extract and export to other economies so that they can add value and sell them back to us.
Or we can take control of our economy through innovation and development.
We keep some of those jobs that are adding value in our economy.
The approach the government seems to be favouring is the former.
The budget documents talk about jobs in construction. Television commercials talk about repairing buildings and infrastructure. But nowhere is there mention of developing the new industries that will serve our future and make us a player in the global economy.
While China is tooling up to become a major player in the wind turbine, solar panel, and bio-energy markets, we are trying to find ways to get ethanol from corn and export more of the tar sands.
Something is wrong with this picture.
But maybe that is what the smoke screen of the national anthem was for -- so that no one would see that this is a budget and a government without a vision for the future.
We deserve better.
