COMMENT
A4
THURSDAY, NOV. 13, 2014
Paying the fiscal piper As Finance Minister Joe Oliver rose Wednesday to deliver a fiscal update to a blue-chip business audience that trumpets balanced books and a surplus on the way, it is be a good time to remember how we got here. It’s also a good time to remember how quickly a surplus can be vacuumed up. It was after the deep cuts unveiled in his 2012 budget that the former finance minister, the late Jim Flaherty, told TIM Canadians that HARPER those cuts were to “back-office operations” of government that would not be noticed by Canadians. It was all about fat, not delivery of services, he told us. A quest to test that theory by former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page ended up in court, unresolved. But there is at least anecdotal information — and lots of it — that some of those back-office cuts are banging on the front door in 2014. A simple tally of recent reports, some gleaned by this newspaper and The Canadian Press and testimony before parliamentary committees, gives us a partial sense of what we are sacrificing to ensure this government could get to surplus and offer its tax breaks in a pre-election period. This week alone there was a report from the government’s public accounts showing the Harper government’s spending on marine safety had plunged 27 per cent since 2009-10 while aviation and rail safety were both down 20 per cent or more. Transport Canada says the cuts were made on overhead, administrative and support services, but opposition critics find it hard to believe safety is not being compromised while oil shipments by rail skyrocket. Another document obtained by The Canadian Press showed Aboriginal Affairs had to shift $505 million in money earmarked for infrastructure over a six-year period to social and educational spending. The money has bled the infrastructure fund and still not covered the shortfall on education and social spending. The infrastructure shortfall means fewer schools and more boil water orders in First Nations communities.
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The information commissioner, Suzanne Legault, has also gone public, complaining she cannot keep up with complaints over the antiquated Access to Information Act. Her $11.2-million budget has been sliced by nine per cent over five years while complaints are soaring, up by 31 per cent last year alone. The Toronto Star has reported extensively on cuts at Parks Canada, which is dealing with a $27-million shave from its planned $659.7-million 201415 budget, meaning shorter seasons at national parks and restricted hours at historic sites. Money will also be saved by moving away from guided tours, making them “self-guided visitor activities.” Tuesday, in a published opinion piece, Colin Kenny, the former chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, points to a $44-million cut from the budget at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service two years ago and a 15 per cent dip in the
RCMP budget over four years. RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson, in testimony to the committee on which Kenny sits, did not ask for more money — not in public — but he said he had to reallocate resources to anti-terror duties. Just last week, Page’s successor, Jean-Denis Frechette, warned that the package of tax breaks and increases to child benefits leave no room for permanent tax cuts or spending increases for Oliver in the next federal budget. He also called for long-term thinking regarding the needs of an aging population, particularly when it comes to health-care costs. Federal transfers to the provinces for health care increase by six per cent per year until 2016-17, but will then be tied to national economic growth, a take-it-or-leave-it edict passed down by Flaherty early in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s majority mandate. Frechette says billions of dollars of health-care costs will be downloaded
onto the provinces. The Conservative government is exactly where it wants to be, using a surplus to target families with children in an election year, daring its political opponents to cancel those breaks if they want to spend a surplus elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t get to where they wanted to be with no damage to services. Those who analyze government spending always knew it would take service cuts, not salary and hiring freezes, attrition and reduced travel to get to this point. While you await your cheques, you might want to remember they didn’t come free. It may have already cost you from health care to security, from access to parks to treatment of our First Nations. Tim Harper is a syndicated Toronto Star national affairs writer. He can be reached at tharper@thestar.ca.
A new Cold War? Not a chance “The world is on the brink of a new Cold War. Some say that it has already begun,” said Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union and the man who inadvertently administered a mercy killing to communism in Europe. He’s 83-yearsold, he played a leading role in ending the last Cold War and he’s practically a secular saint. Surely he knows what he’s talking about. N o h e doesn’t. Not only has GWYNNE this new Cold War not begun DYER already, but it’s hard to see how you could get it going even if you tried. The raw material for such an enterprise is simply unavailable. You can summon the ghosts of history all you want, but they are dead and they can’t hear you. Gorbachev was speaking in Berlin, now once again the capital of a united Germany, on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even he would agree that it turned out to be, on balance, a good thing, but he is a great deal more ambivalent about the collapse of European communism and the
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CENTRAL ALBERTA’S DAILY NEWSPAPER Published at 2950 Bremner Avenue, Red Deer, Alberta, T4R 1M9 by The Red Deer Advocate Ltd. Canadian Publications Agreement #336602 Member of the Audit Bureau of Circulation Fred Gorman Publisher John Stewart Managing editor Richard Smalley Advertising director
dismantling of the Soviet Union. His original goal, and his hope right down to the end in 1991, was to save communism by reforming it, not to bury it. He also believed, or at least hoped, that if he could make communist rule “democratic” and user-friendly, he could save the Soviet Union as well. But the Soviet Union was just the old Russian empire in new clothes. Gorbachev was and is a romantic, and he undoubtedly agrees with his rather less cuddly successor as president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” So of course he ends up defending Putin’s actions and blaming the United States and NATO for this alleged drift into a new Cold War. It’s all nonsense. Nothing could have saved the old Soviet Union. It was the last of the European empires to fall, mainly because it was land-based rather than sea-based, but only half its population was Russian. When it finally dissolved, 15 nations emerged from the wreckage, and its collapse was no greater a loss to civilization than the fall of the British or French empires. And the main reason you can’t have a new Cold War is precisely because the “evil empire” (as Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union) longer exists. There is only Russia, a largely de-industrialized country that is run by a kleptocratic elite and
makes its living by exporting oil and gas. Russia has only 140 million people (less than half the United States, less than a third of the European Union), and its armies are no longer based around Berlin and all through eastern Europe. They are 750 km further east, guarding Russia’s own frontiers. They occasionally grab a bit of territory that isn’t covered by a NATO guarantee (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Crimea, Luhansk, Donestk), but they dare not go any further. So you could get a really unpleasant NATO-Russian confrontation out of this for a while (although it hasn’t happened yet), but not a real Cold War in the old globe-spanning style. Russia just couldn’t hold up its end of it. As for World War Three, don’t worry. Putin cares a lot about saving face, but not that much. Which leaves the question: who is to blame for this regrettable hostility between Russia and the Western powers? The West, in Gorbachev’s view. In fact, he had a whole list of complaints about Western threats, crimes and betrayals. NATO broke its promise and let all the Eastern European countries that had been Soviet satellites during the Cold War join NATO. It let Kosovo declare its independence from Russia’s traditional friend, Serbia. It launched wars of “regime change” in the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) that Moscow disapproved of. It even
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planned a missile defence system that allegedly threatened Russia’s nuclear deterrent (if you could believe that it would work). Yes, Russia has been invaded a lot in its history, but the licence to be paranoid expires after 50 years. Of course the Eastern European countries all clamoured to join NATO; they’re still terrified of Russia. The Western great powers do lots of stupid stuff and some seriously bad stuff, and Russia has also done a fair amount of both in the past decade and a half under Putin. The job of diplomats, and of leaders in particular, is to avoid the really stupid and dangerous stuff, and keep the rest to a minimum. Barack Obama has been quite good at that, as has German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Putin used to be good at it, but is not so good now, perhaps because he has been in power too long. His military interventions in Ukraine have been alarmingly rash. But nobody is going to go to war with Russia over Ukraine. The Ukrainians were told years ago that they couldn’t shelter under NATO’s security blanket, and they have chosen to defy Moscow anyway. They may pay a high price for that, and the Western alliance’s relations with Russia may go into the deep freeze for the remainder of Putin’s reign. But it will be just a little local difficulty, not a huge event that defines an entire era. Dyer is an independent journalist who is published in 45 countries.
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