I loved this line from John Ibbitson in the Globe and Mail today.
...The way things are going, we might as well ask the leader of the Green Party what his fiscal plan for 2010 might be.
He is more likely than Paul Martin to be prime minister five years from now.
Let's just say that Mr. Ibbitson is not impressed with the budget - that is not a budget.
...Even if, thanks to some distortion in the space-time continuum, this fiscal flummery were actually passed into law before the next election, most of its measures would still be meaningless. Take that tax cut, again. The biggest reductions don't come into effect until 2010. Since this government lasted less than a year and a half, and since a minority government of some description or another is virtually inevitable at the next election, and at the election after that (unless you have a magic potion that will make the Bloc Québécois go away), it is reasonable to assume that there will be at least three elections between now and 2010.
(quoted out of order for effect)
Jeffrey Simpson (also from the G&M) is lessed than impressed as well. But what he claims (correctly I might add) that what is good about it should have been official Conservative policy since they lost the election in 2004.
...Conservatives, who predictably scorned the mini-budget, should have been pounding away at these productivity themes ever since losing the 2004 election. This ought to have been their agenda — tax cuts and human capital investments — but, by virtue of timidity and a fixation on "corruption," they let the Liberals steal the issues.
Conservatives dribbled out itsy-bitsy policies instead of branding themselves the party of policy change. So they have no one to blame but themselves for allowing the Liberals to move into a vacuum that should never have existed.
Whether the electorate will pay any attention to policy ideas is highly unlikely, given the average voter's lack of interest in, or knowledge of, any tangible ideas. So,
too, a lot of voters won't credit this mini-budget as anything but a deathbed repentance.
The Conservatives' basic bet has been that the Liberals will defeat themselves. They reckoned that time for a change and perceptions of corruption will do in the Liberals. Maybe the Conservatives will be proved right. Their leader must hope so; otherwise, he will be fighting his last campaign.
What Canadians saw yesterday, in broad outline, should have been the Conservatives' agenda. A lot of people have been desperately hoping the Conservatives would give them something positive to think about. Instead, they got it yesterday, belatedly, from the Liberals.
