| The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, February 04 2009, By Dan Gardner. ©The Ottawa Citizen. |
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We're brimming with little ideas. Two themes emerge from analysis of Stephen Harper's latest budget. One, it's big. Really big. Surpluses of a few billion a year will become a deficit of $34 billion in 2009, as the government shovels money into the economy like coal into a steam engine (or dirt down a well, if one is more skeptical of the value of fiscal stimulus). Two, there's something for everything. There's money for agriculture. For infrastructure. For forestry. For the arts, shipbuilding, seniors, aboriginals, municipalities, energy retrofits, tourism ... on and on the list goes. Much of this spending will clearly deliver no lasting benefit. Some of it could, particularly the money for infrastructure. But for that to happen, the spending has to be done carefully and it has to be guided by a clear and consistent long-term vision. That's a problem. There is, after all, little reason to expect careful spending when the overriding concern is to shovel the money as quickly as Jim Flaherty's little arms can lift it. But the real killer is, as George H. W. Bush said, the vision thing. There isn't one. The government has no vision. Neither do the opposition parties. And don't look to corporations, labour, the non-profit sector, or any other component of Canadian public life. They're as myopic as the political leadership. That's the real story of this budget. Under pressure economically and politically, the government was forced into the biggest splurge in Canadian history. Whether wise or foolish, this created an opportunity to do some lasting good. This budget will deliver a regional development agency for southern Ontario. It will fund efforts to lure cruise ships to the St. Lawrence. It will help with the cost of those granite countertops you've always wanted. But it will not do lasting good. It's not just that some of the spending is silly. It's that all of it is unfocused.
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Spending on science, for example, is smart because the potential for long-term benefit is high. And sure enough, there's money for science. "The budget provides $750 million to build new university labs and $2 billion to refurbish old university labs and $250 million to fix federal government labs and $87.5 million for scholarships so graduate students can sit in all those labs," Paul Wells noted in Maclean's. Good stuff. But, Paul, what else does the budget do? "It cuts the budgets for the granting councils that pay for research. Apparently all those grad students are supposed to do something else in all those labs besides research." That is the sort of incoherence you can expect when narrow policy choices are not guided by a broad vision. And no, contrary to what some commentators seem to think, the fault for this lack of vision is not Stephen Harper's alone. Canada is brimming with little ideas, but lacking in anything grand and ambitious. There are plenty of vague sentiments, but no clear goals. There's lots of talk about next month and next year but little about the next decade or three. Look at what successive governments -- Liberal and Conservative, please note -- did with almost a decade of fat surpluses. They got rid of a lot of debt. That was a good move. But they did that mainly by lying: Lie about how big the surplus will be; pretend to be surprised when it's bigger; pay down debt quick before anyone objects. Whatever that is, it's not a vision. The other thing governments did with those surpluses is spend more without any particular idea of what all that spending was supposed to accomplish. Not surprisingly, it accomplished remarkably little. It's as if the last decade was a children's birthday party, which was a lot of fun, but now it's over and we have nothing but a loot bag filled with Gummy Bears and Spider-Man stickers. The next couple of years won't be nearly as much fun and there's a good chance all we'll have to show for it is another crappy loot bag. It doesn't have to be this way.
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Finland has a world-beating educational system and is home to telecom giant Nokia. Denmark leads the world in alternative energy, particularly wind power. Sweden boasts some of the most recognizable brands in the world and its environmental policy focus is churning out important innovations. Then there's Norway, the Alberta of Scandinavia. Norway has oil. But unlike Alberta, Norway has superb infrastructure and massive savings. All these countries are doing much more than Canada with much less. The difference is vision. In each of these countries, discussions led to an understanding of the choices available. Choices led to priorities. Priorities to visions. And those visions -- Sweden as an environmental leader, for example -- guide subsequent policy decisions. Getting to a vision required extensive discussions, with everyone from politicians to community activists involved. But the result in every case is a remarkably broad consensus that the vision is a good one -- a consensus broad enough to survive changes in government. Visions are handy things. The Swedish government, for example, just responded to the economic crisis with a major stimulus package that will put the budget into deficit (which will be half the size of Canada's relative to GDP). So far, so familiar. But thanks to the coherence of Sweden's policy vision, it's a safe bet that Sweden will focus its spending in ways that deliver long-term benefit --and years from now Swedes will have much more to show for all this spending than a loot bag and debt. Yes, these countries are small and relatively homogeneous. That helps in developing a national vision. But still, we can do it. In fact, we've done it before. It was back in the mid-1990s. Remember that? We agreed to defeat the deficit -- and never again make the mistake of frittering away borrowed money. You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen. |
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Copyright © 2005 Dan Gardner |