Battling the Budget

They say you never forget your first broken election promise when you have a majority.

Less than two weeks after riding to a majority victory, the Conservative government is already backtracking on one of its central campaign promises to eliminate the deficit by 2014-15. Dan Leger of The Halifax Chronicle Herald grouses over the admission, given that many commentators questioned the Tories on how they'd manage to pay down the deficit quicker than they had outlined in their budget just a month earlier. “Sooner is better in politics, even if it wasn’t clear what spells the Tories planned to cast to achieve their goal, other than a vague notion to find $4 billion in spending cuts,” says Leger. “Any surplus, even one pulled from a hat only to disappear immediately, is better than none at all.” And so, to the surprise of just about no one, political expediency trumps fiscal reality once again.

But so long as the Tories are committed to cutting the deficit, Thomas Axworthy suggests in the National Post that Jim Flaherty uses this budget to reform the federal public service. “Eyes tend to glaze over on the topic of civil service reform,” says Axworthy. “Because of this, there has been an explosion of expensive, temporary hiring.” Consultants and contract workers increasingly fill the payrolls in Ottawa because of the bureaucratic finagling it takes to get someone working full-time (Axworthy says it takes nearly six months on average to recruit and hire an employee). Given that the Tories were given a mandate to rein in spending, Axworthy figures consultants are “one candidate for major trimmings which will end an abuse, save substantial money and is devoid of any public support.”

Dealing with the deficit will rank among the hardest challenges Stephen Harper faces, according to The Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson. “Elections have a way of messing up a country’s finances,” he writes, and the deficit promise will be hard to reconcile with another to compensate Quebec for implementing the harmonized sales tax. That, alongside grumbling from the provinces over health care, managing a much larger caucus, and handling U.S. pressure on copyright, immigration, and border control, means “Harper may yet come to long for the day when he could blame it all on the parties across the way.” We're sure he'll find a way to continue doing so anyway.