Good Riddance to a Bad Budget

It's just as well Canadians are headed to the polls; from left to right, no one was happy with this budget.

Niels Veldhuis
Director of fiscal studies and a Senior Economist at the Fraser Institute.

This budget is extremely disappointing. This is a status-quo budget plan, and one that doesn't do the work required to deal with the most pressing budget issue: the size of the deficit. It's going to defer balancing the budget for the next five years. We have a federal government that seems unwilling to tackle the deficit head on.

What we're seeing in this budget are the boutique tax cuts that the Conservatives have used throughout their time in office, going right back to 2006. We are now seeing tax cuts for parents of children who want to be in art class, and a smattering of tax cuts for a whole host of different interest groups.

What Canadians should have been expecting is a solid plan to get back to balanced budgets in a two- to three-year time frame. That's what the Liberal government did in 1995, that’s what put Canada on the map in terms of our fiscal situation, and that’s what helped Canada through the recession.

This is not a small-c conservative budget. The only thing that's conservative about this budget is its name.

Stephen Brown
Associate Professor of political science, University of Ottawa.

I was disappointed not to find any mention, in the budget, of foreign aid and Canada’s contributions to fighting poverty and inequality around the world.

Daniel Weinstock
Canada Research Chair, ethics and political philosophy, Université de Montréal.

My initial reaction is that this is a budget designed to trigger an election while allowing the PM to put the blame for launching an election on the opposition parties. In particular, Harper gave the NDP too little for them to be able to support the budget without seeming weak and unprincipled, but enough to be able to present himself to the Canadian electorate as reasonable and willing to compromise, while making the opposition seem unbending.

Harper has shoehorned the opposition parties into an election campaign that they – Bloc notwithstanding – aren't in a particularly good position to run. Pure malevolent genius. It has Harper written all over it, and I would not be surprised if this ended with the establishment of a Conservative majority.