At left is an excerpt from a John Ivison column on the federal Liberal government’s budget which ran in the National Post section of Thursday’s Regina Leader-Post.
You can read the column here, but the general tone is that the government is being overly generous with its “largesse” and that the modest deficits that are forecast for the next few years risk plunging Canada into a financial abyss.
The only initiative that Ivison singles out is the new child benefit which is meant to provide support for Canadian families with young children. But in another National Post column in the same section, new spending is identified for, and I quote, “Indigenous Peoples, post-secondary education, middle and modest income families, municipal infrastructure, the recently unemployed, veterans and seniors.”
The analogy Ivison uses to characterize Canadian families in line for the child benefit speaks for itself, I guess. At the same time he (along with Jason Kenney in a tweet cited in the column) is critical of the Liberal government for not spending enough to counteract terrorism and for scaling back $3.7 billion in funding commitments for military equipment that the Conservatives had made before being turfed from office in October.
Just as we have no idea what the true state of Saskatchewan’s finances are heading into the provincial election, with former Finance Minister Ken Krawetz’s surplus of $106.8 million in the April 2015 budget having morphed into a $427 million deficit due to the ongoing resource price crash, it’s impossible to say what Canada’s books would have looked like had the Conservatives won the last election and been presented with the same challenge as the Liberals of bringing in a budget in a slumping economy — an economy they essentially created through their obsessive focus on resource extraction.
Anyway, I just thought I’d point out what PostMedia, via its columnist John Ivison, thinks of the average Canadian family.