Martin wins budget-related political struggle

Making the rich happy is good for his leadership bid, bad for rest of us

By: Mel Watkins

  If anyone had invited me to play pre-budget television pundit, I would have echoed what most of the those who were consulted said - that there was likely to be as much, possibly even more, in the way of spending increases in the budget as there'd be in tax cuts.
  It's the usual line - that the Liberals' genius is knowing how to hog the oxygen, puff up and occupy the middle.
  After all, the polls consistently show that we want to restore cash to social programs and that we give low priority to tax cuts.
  There was said to have been a struggle in the government between Mr. Martin, who, being a good Minister of Finance, is especially able to feel that special pain felt by the rich and the corporate when they actually have to pay their taxes, and Mr. Chretien and most others, who know that the rest of the population have the votes and that the government might be entering the last year of its mandate. Martin had to lose.
  The surprise is that he won. For the first time, the federal Liberals have jumped on the tax-cut wagon that's hitherto been the property of the neo- conservative governments of Klein and Harris.
 

The fact that people earn money because the state schooled them and kept them healthy is ignored, and with it the argument for spending on schools and hospitals

  In doing so, Martin mouthed that great shibboleth of the right: "Canadians are entitled to keep more of the money they earn. After all, they worked for it. It's theirs."
  The fact that they could earn it because the state schooled them and kept them healthy is ignored, and with it the argument for spending on schools and hospitals.
  Perhaps the reason for this is as simple as the government's need to do something dramatic and unexpected to turn the media heat down on Jane Stewart and the scams in her department. But there could be more to it than that.
  The Liberals continue to assume that the electoral threat will come from the right, divided though it is, so they're sticking with their strategy of pre-empting the policies of the Reform party - the official, and vocal, opposition.
  When you can make the rich and powerful happy (given their greed an impossibility, but at least they're not so unhappy) and finesse the opposition, disregarding public opinion is a risk worth taking.
  After all, if an election were called tomorrow, where's the alternative to the Liberals that any significant number of voters across Canada would opt for?
  Thus, a budget that has only a modest one-time increase for health care and education.
  On the face of it, the Liberals have made themselves vulnerable to the accusation from the NDP and the Tories - and probably even from Reform, bizarre though that will be - that health care is being malignly neglected.
  So in the next budget, just before the next election, for that one brief moment when public opinion actually counts, bet on the Liberals rediscovering their commitment to our well-being.
  Thus, too, a budget that has no national daycare program (whatever happened to the children's agenda?), no national housing policy (summer's coming, so why do anything for the homeless), no home-care program, no pharmacare, no national cultural policy. Zip, rounding to nothing, for the poor and the unemployed.
  There's certainly no shortage of issues for those of you with "special interests'' to organize around.
  This budget's clever manoeuvring is what today passes for politics. Too clever, I hope, pray, beg and beseech. But since we still technically live in a democracy, that must be for you to decide.
  Please, I need a surprise I'd like.

Mel Watkins is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Toronto.

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