Suppose you are an average Canadian family with two wage-earners, making a total of $71,500, which is about the middle of the middle 20 per cent group of all Canadian families. You and your spouse had promised each other that once you turned a financial corner, and were no longer sliding into debt, you’d do something nice together. Maybe a weekend escape, just the two of you.
You tally all of last year’s income versus expenses and discover — to your complete surprise — that you have $1,100 left over. Time to make a hotel reservation, and maybe a meal in some classy restaurant? Well, maybe, but would you do it if one of you had sold your Chevrolet Equinox for a loss, just to make the numbers look better?
Granted, you’re not sliding worse into debt, and after all, the interest on your mortgage and credit cards put together is only $530 a month. For a family in the middle of the middle, you’re doing OK. But if you want to be honest with each other, you have to admit you’re just lucky to have broken even.
A small indulgence for a family like this might actually be in order. But for a government, it’s nothing to crow about.
Monday’s announcement that the last budget year ended with a $1.9 billion surplus certainly isn’t bad news. After all, when last year began, we were expecting a $2-billion deficit. But when you sell assets at a loss (the shares in General Motors the government bought during the recession), and short out spending on priorities that Parliament had previously approved, let’s not get too excited.
The figure quoted in news releases Monday refer to about 1.5 per cent of budget spending. Our government will spend about $288 billion in the current budget year. What’s $1.9 billion inside of that?
Well, it’s $1.9 billion, and as the American politician Everett Dirksen once said: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
Our current election seems to constantly circle back to who it is we trust best with their hands on the federal cashbox. No other consideration seems to have traction; not protecting our environment, not Canada’s place in the world as a trade partner or peacekeeper, not our obligations to the poor either at home or abroad, not whether the government and its agents even follow the law. Just how big our own personal tax bill is and whether this year’s budget balances within 1.5 per cent.
Maybe in today’s world, that’s all most of us expect from government. Tax us if you have to, but please, no big pictures — and for God’s sake balance the budget.
If that’s true, then Monday’s announcement is all the Conservatives need to win the election. Who’s Mike Duffy anyway? Health care is a provincial problem, isn’t it? We can bomb people in foreign countries, as long as none of our people get hurt. And as far as that goes, we don’t especially like their refugees.
If government lies to us, hides noxious policies in omnibus bills and chivvies away at our international reputation on peacekeeping and the environment, all can be forgiven for a balanced budget.
If the equivalent of $1,100 to a middle-income family one year in six is the bottom line in our expectations of government, we really have no expectations at all.
Just don’t any of us try to call this leadership.
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