{"id":230996,"date":"2021-04-19T23:40:26","date_gmt":"2021-04-19T20:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/budget-2021-welcome-back-standard-operating-procedures\/"},"modified":"2021-04-19T23:40:26","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T20:40:26","slug":"budget-2021-welcome-back-standard-operating-procedures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/budget-2021-welcome-back-standard-operating-procedures\/","title":{"rendered":"#Budget 2021: Welcome back, standard operating procedures"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Budget 2021: Welcome back, standard operating procedures<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Paul Wells: The budget focuses on the sort of things a government like Canada’s should be working on right now. But the big bet is on childcare\u2014and the devil is in the details.\n <\/div>\n
\n Maybe we should begin by eliminating some straw men.<\/p>\n
    \n
  1. There\u2019s nothing in Chrystia Freeland\u2019s first budget that seems either designed or likely to force a no-confidence vote from enough opposition parties to force an election. If Justin Trudeau wants an election, he\u2019s going to need to visit Rideau Hall, or wherever they\u2019re keeping the temporary Governor General<\/a> these days, all by himself. I suspect he doesn\u2019t want an election. So we won\u2019t be having one soon.<\/li>\n
  2. There will be much excellent analysis of all the spending and all the deficit and debt that come with it. I don\u2019t think the spending in itself is a crisis. I know you\u2019ll be able to get enough hand-wringing over deficits from other pundits so I won\u2019t add any of my own here.<\/li>\n
  3. Freeland\u2019s budget is not<\/em> a \u201cbuild back better\u201d extravaganza unmoored from the reality of a still-acute global health crisis. Any attempts to repeal capitalism as part of a \u201cGreat Reset\u201d remote-controlled from Davos<\/a> are somewhere between extremely tentative and non-existent. After a year of hoping, sometimes to an unseemly extent, that they could transform a hellish pandemic into a progressive heaven, the Trudeau Liberals seem to have decided they must simply govern instead.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The result is more or less the budget you would have expected, plus child care. I\u2019ll get to the child care part in a moment. It\u2019s big.<\/p>\n

    Otherwise, most of the budget\u2019s big new spending simply extends last year\u2019s big spending on income support, because the coronavirus is still with us. There\u2019s $10 billion in 2020-21 to extend the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy; $9.6 billion in 2021-22 to enrich the Canada Recovery Benefit and regular Employment Insurance; billions more in assorted measures to replace job income for people who can\u2019t do their jobs. This is what dug the government into its very large deficit hole. It made sense to do this stuff. And it does not yet make sense to wind those programs down.<\/p>\n

    At a smaller scale in dollars, there\u2019s a lot of effort to ensure Canadians head into the post-pandemic world with the skills and business capabilities they need to succeed. The dollar amounts are modest-ish. There\u2019s $4 billion over four years to recruit 28,000 young Canadians to help small businesses adopt new technology<\/a>. I\u2019m curious to see whether that money winds up getting spent. How many businesses will agree that what\u2019s on offer from Ottawa matches their business plan? A federal official we\u2019re not allowed to name was very excited when describing all this stuff to reporters, but this is not our first skills rodeo. Making the offer match the need is a challenge that has vexed governments for longer than I\u2019ve been in Ottawa. Hope for a better result springs eternal. But there are reasons why the earlier attempts didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

    On to child care. The pandemic revealed a gap in Canada\u2019s social<\/a> programs, Freeland says, one that previous Liberal governments had promised to fill and one on which Trudeau\u2019s government had made listless, modest progress<\/a>. Those days are over. This budget provides $30 billion over five years, leading to a steady spend of more than $8 billion a year forever after, for \u201cearly learning and child care.\u201d It\u2019s by far the biggest new spending item in the budget. The devil will be in the details. There are many details.<\/p>\n

    First, I now officially haven\u2019t the faintest idea what Justin Trudeau meant when he wrote to his new finance minister three months ago telling her she \u201cwill avoid creating new permanent spending.\u201d She sure didn\u2019t do that. One suspects he won\u2019t mind. Public officials should be reluctant to make it this<\/em> clear their instructions have no meaning.<\/p>\n

    Second, the point of the \u201cno new permanent spending\u201d charade was that the provinces, unanimously, have specific ideas for new spending. They\u2019d like $28 billion a year in new health transfers<\/a>. It\u2019s a ludicrous sum but directionally a perfectly fair request. As Quebec\u2019s Fran\u00e7ois Legault points out, the most obvious gap the pandemic revealed is a shambles in long-term care, and once he hires more long-term care workers, he\u2019ll be expected to pay them every year. Similarly, intensive-care capacity won\u2019t stop being a problem after COVID; it was already a problem before the outbreak; and it\u2019s likely to be aggravated over the medium term by all the diseases and conditions whose routine treatment got elbowed aside by the pandemic.<\/p>\n

    Since it became clear the premiers were unanimously and reasonably<\/em> calling for increased health transfers, they\u2019ve had three answers from Ottawa: \u201cNo;\u201d \u201cwe\u2019ll give you $3 billion a year for public transit;\u201d and \u201cwe\u2019ll give you $8 billion a year for daycare.\u201d No federal government is ever obliged to do what provincial governments demand. But child care will mostly be administered by provincial governments, so the disagreement over the best use of the next transfer dollar is not merely academic. It\u2019ll directly affect the tone, and perhaps the success or failure, of necessary negotiations on program design.<\/p>\n

    Incidentally the feds like to brag that they\u2019ve hosted 29 conference-call simulacra of federal-provincial conferences over the past year. The point of all those calls is hardly obvious. What\u2019s going better in federal-provincial relations these days?<\/p>\n

    Very big questions of program design will need to be crunched. Will for-profit childcare centres be eligible? The budget document suggests some will. Advocates of not-for-profit care may be highly displeased.<\/p>\n

    I wonder what welcome a new child-care solution will receive among parents who don\u2019t work schedules that fit well with daycare operators\u2019 schedules. All the evidence suggests there\u2019ll be more such parents<\/a> in the near future than there already were. And finally, there is unpopular but serious academic research questioning the developmental benefits of the Quebec daycare model.<\/p>\n

    I suspect the answer to such criticisms will be that there\u2019s a consensus in favour of child care; that Ottawa\u2019s money offer is substantially non-negotiable; and that provinces mustn\u2019t look gift horses in the mouth. Many will accept the offer, some with more or less enthusiasm than others. I wonder what they\u2019ll say about this budget\u2019s claim that Ottawa is offering to pay for half of the new program, given that the basis of their health-care demands is that Ottawa once paid for half of health care and has lately been covering less than a quarter.<\/p>\n

    Anyway I\u2019m also not sure we\u2019ll be talking about any of this in two years. Previous depositories of the Prime Minister\u2019s enthusiasm\u2014pharmacare, the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the innovation superclusters\u2014are now mired in delay or indifference. This Prime Minister didn\u2019t finish a lot of projects in life before he moved to Ottawa, and his inexhaustible affection for new projects will be tested if he keeps the job long enough for this project to become less thrilling.<\/p>\n

    The last thing worth saying about this budget is that it\u2019s actually not particularly loopy. The things Trudeau and Freeland focus on here are the sort of things a government like Canada\u2019s should be working on right now. A couple weeks ago the OECD, the economic club Bill Morneau once hoped to run, released evaluations of member states\u2019 economic prospects and policy choices. The page for Canada<\/a> said we\u2019d do well to \u201cstrengthen support for vulnerable households;\u201d \u201cincrease the labour-market participation of women;\u201d \u201creduce barriers to internal trade;\u201d \u201creduce barriers to entry for both domestic and foreign suppliers\u201d by increasing competition and reducing regulation; \u201celiminate inefficient tax expenditures;\u201d and increase carbon prices.<\/p>\n

    By my reckoning, the government is hard at work on support for vulnerable households, labour-market participation of women, and carbon prices. It\u2019s doing very little on the rest. Let the debate begin on whether this budget is a triumph or disgrace. From where I\u2019m sitting it\u2019s kind of middling.
    \n<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n