Hey Mr. Flaherty, where's all the tax relief and innovation?

As I'm sure many of you are well aware, attempting to make ends meet can sometimes be a daunting challeng in a province, like New Brunswick, where traditional industries are slowly dwindling and jobs are scarce. NBers work very hard for the money they earn. When they have to give part of that money to government they deserve to have it spent as responsibly as if they were spending it themselves.

Which brings me to the federal conservative's "economic" record over the past year. We here at NB Taxpayer rate Prime Minister Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's handling of the economic file as "poor". Why? Because they veered away from their commitments (made during the '06 election) to reduce the size of government, spend less, and lower taxes as well as strengthen free trade, competition and innovation. Let's be honest, these guys have been content (thus far) on preserving the status quo through more "Liberal-lite" policies rather than delivering on their promises of being a much more fiscally responsible regime.

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[Financial Post]

"Though they promised to do away with it, corporate welfare continues. Instead of the disgraceful Technology Partnerships Canada, we now have the Strategic Aerospace and Defence Initiative, which will hand out $225-million annually over five years, to aerospace and defence firms.

There has been no effort to overhaul the employment insurance program, which has strayed so far away from its original mandate to give short-term assistance to the unemployed that it is used as an income supplement for seasonal workers, restricting labour mobility."

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[Canadian Free Press]

"We now have a Conservative minority government in Ottawa that is swelling the ranks of the bureaucracy and shoveling out money like there's no tomorrow. Like the minority Liberal government of Paul Martin before them, they have a huge surplus in the federal budget, yet the Harper government isn't using the money to pay down the debt, nor is it giving any of it back to the taxpayers. [...]

The word "surplus" is key in that it means governments are collecting way more in taxes than they need. Given that the average Canadian family has 45% of its income confiscated by the various levels of government, Nearly one-third more than they spend on food, shelter and clothing, one would think that governments would give some of that money back, or at least use it to pay off debt."

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[Andrew Coyne]
"Last year’s centrepiece in this regard was the tax “cut” that was actually a tax increase. The previous Liberal government, in one of its last acts, had cut the bottom rate of tax for 2005 from 16% to 15%. The May budget then raised it back to 15.5%. But because the Liberal tax cut had not yet been formally enacted into law, the Tories claimed the 15.5% rate actually represented, not an increase from 15%, but a cut from 16%.

But that was child’s play compared to this year’s installment. Yesterday’s column talked about the government’s misuse of the term “tax cuts” to refer to what are really spending programs, delivered through the tax system -- what the budget elsewhere accounts as tax expenditures, $14.8-billion of them in all. A few other examples:

[...] Item. The budget maintains, notwithstanding a $25-billion increase in spending over two years, that the government is showing unwavering fiscal discipline. How? Because it has kept the growth in spending to no more than the growth in the economy, “on average.”

Now, people like me would argue the percent-of-GDP measure is misleading: it implies that, so long as spending has not grown faster than the economy, it has not grown at all. But I supppose that’s within the bounds of acceptable political chicanery.

Or would be, if in fact spending had grown slower than the economy. But, again, the budget’s own figures show that it hasn’t. Program spending was 12.8% of GDP in fiscal 2006, 13.1% in 2007, and will be 13.3% in 2008.

How, then, do the Tories maintain that spending has grown no faster than the economy, even “on average?” By including in the average fiscal 2006, a year in which nominal spending actually declined slightly (though only after a nearly 15% gain the previous year). Just one problem: the Liberals were in power in fiscal 2006, or all but the last two months of it. The Tories are claiming credit for Liberal “restraint.”

Item. The budget claims to have solved “the fiscal imbalance” -- a debatable claim about a debatable problem. It does so largely by way of changes to the equalization system, among them a provision that would include 50% of provincial resource revenues in calculating the standard to which provinces must be “equalized.” Yet the Tories campaigned on a promise to exclude these revenues from the equalization formula, in their entirety.

A broken promise, right? Not according to the budget. Thanks to various add-ons and one-time payments, it claims, no province will be worse off under the 50% inclusion rate than it would be if resources were kept out entirely. This, it says, will “fulfill the Government’s commitment to fully exclude non-renewable natural resources revenues from the calculation of Equalization.” But it didn’t fully exclude them. It half-included them. It might have compensated provinces for breaking its promise, but it still broke the promise."

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Now I realize that this government is focused on real issues like fighting with provincial leaders, RCMP, senators, etc. But let's get real here fellas, there is still a country's economy to run, so we would appreciate it if your government got back to work over the summer break to undo all these poor policy initiatives pronto. Maybe you can start by giving some of the money back in the form of real tax relief?