Less Than Meets The Eye

So much for fiscal prudence. So long credibility.

Those words, written By Scott Clark and Peter DeVries, succinctly summarize the illusions, misdirection and magical thinking that Joe Oliver's budget is based on.

As the authors point out, six 'rabbits' that Oliver pulled out of his hat on Tuesday conceal some disquieting truths:

First, the government changed the methodology the Finance Department uses to forecast oil prices. Oliver is now forecasting that oil prices will increase in the coming years, averaging $54 a barrel in 2015, $67 in 2016, $75 in 2017 and $78 a barrel in 2018 and 2019.

According to projections by the World Bank, this is quite an optimistic forecast.

The second rabbit was the selling off of capital assets to cover one-time spending. In the budget, asset sales amounted to an incremental $1 billion in 2015-16, resulting from the sales of the government’s GM shares. These shares were sold at a steep loss solely to achieve a political commitment — a balanced budget in 2015-16

The next feat of prestidigitation is found in the contingency fund:

In previous budgets, Finance included a contingency reserve of $3 billion per year. The contingency reserve is also there as a buffer in the event that economic results do not turn out as expected. The contingency reserve was cut to bone Tuesday — to just $1 billion in each of the next three years.

Given the precarious financial outlook for the world, this cut can only be seen as foolish, reckless, and overtly political.

The fourth rabbit was an increase in the “lapse” — the amount of funds appropriated to departments and agencies by Parliament but not spent during the course of the year. The lapse for 2015-16 and the next two fiscal years has been increased...

The consequences of such 'lapses' cannot be underestimated. Here is but one example:

The fifth rabbit was the government’s decision to continue to assume higher-than-required Employment insurance (EI) premium rates. This generated an additional $1.8 billion in 2015-16.

And, as Thomas Walkom points out,

The finance minister managed to win his surplus this year largely by taking $3.4 billion from the employment insurance account...

The final rabbit — certainly not the least controversial — is government’s forecast of $900 million in 2015-16 resulting from legislating “a modernized disability and sick leave management system” on public sector unions in the budget bill yet to be tabled.

Since negotiations are ongoing, bargaining in bad faith is not too strong an accusation to level against the government which, in fact, may relish a battle with the unions going into the election, given public antipathy toward those who do well in unionized environments. Nevertheless, counting on almost $1 billion being extracted from public servants does appear to be a tad wishful.

All in all, once the surface of this budget is scratched, the alleged economic prowess of Stephen Harper is once again exposed for the myth that it is.

A Harper Dynasty?

That's what the leaden-tongued Finance Minister seemed to be suggesting last night in discussing his budget. Either that, or the message was "Screw future generations."

You decide:

On Our Diversions

This is one of those days when I haven't felt like writing anything. And George Orwell said just about everything better, anyway.


H/t Mint Press News

Under Harper's Economic 'Stewardship'

H/t Stephen Lautens

Canada's Outlier Status

Well, this is bauble budget day, the day the Harper regime makes its big pre-election push to convince us that all is right with the world, and that our natural selfishness is something we should revel in, not revolt against. It is a day in which further plundering of the federal coffers is presented as a triumph of respect for all "hardworking Canadians" who deserve to keep more of their "hard-earned money." It is a day in which the collective needs of the country and the world are ignored.

Fortunately, not everyone is so easily distracted by the promise of shiny new things. One such individual is Omar Aziz, who, writing about climate change, says that Canada, under Stephen Harper,

is an international pariah. Among rich world countries, Canada is the largest per-capita emitter of GHGs, according to the World Resources Institute. The advocacy group Climate Action Network ranks Canada’s climate strategy as the fourth-worst in the world, ahead of only Iran, Kazakhstan, and Saudi Arabia.

There seems to be no prospect of improvement on this sorry record:

Ottawa will fail to meet the emission targets it pledged at the Copenhagen conference in 2009, just as it failed to meet the UN’s March 31 deadline to submit its emission targets ahead of the upcoming climate change conference in December.

Increasingly, our country is becoming an international pariah:

Having met U.S. President Barack Obama’s Envoy for Climate Change, I am certain that Washington is taking the Paris negotiations very seriously. Canada, meanwhile, looks like it will show up to the Paris conference with almost nothing to offer but talking points, despite the fact that Canadians consume more energy per capita than Indians, Chinese or Americans. This is both a shame and a sham.

Compounding Canada's inexcusable inaction is the heavy hand of Harper censorship:

Ninety per cent of government scientists feel that they are not allowed to speak to the media about their research; almost as many fear retaliation if they do. If you are wondering why climate change reporting in Canada has been so vacuous over the last few years, it is because new rules put in place by Stephen Harper in 2007 limit what Environment Canada scientists can say. The position of National Science Advisor was eliminated in 2008. It should come as no surprise then that media coverage of climate change has been reduced by 80 per cent. If the brilliant government scientists working on this issue are muzzled, the public has little access to the very people it should be hearing from.

Mind you, that hardly excuses the ignorance that many embrace on this subject, given the wealth of information that is available literally at our fingertips. If we are oblivious to the coming peril, it is by our own choice.

The heavy lifting being done by other provinces and countries puts the Harper inaction to shame:

British Columbia has put in place a carbon tax, Quebec has a cap-and-trade system, Ontario announced a similar policy earlier this month, and Alberta has an imperfect but necessary regulatory scheme. The European Union has an ambitious emissions trading program and the United States and China signed a major climate accord last year. China is also piloting seven cap-and-trade programs, including one in Shanghai.

Aziz notes the irony of a federal regime so obsessed with security that it ignores the threats posed by climate change:

Climate change is not simply an environmental concern; it is a national security concern, which is precisely what the Pentagon now calls it.

The effects of climate change will permanently damage wildlife, agriculture, oceans, coastal inhabitants, transportation systems, disease prevention efforts, food and water supplies, public health, and nearly every facet of modern life. The poor and disadvantaged will face the harshest consequences, both in rich countries and in developing ones.

Back in 2009, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called climate change the greatest challenge facing the world. Nothing has changed in the intervening six years other than even more egregious contempt for action from a federal government locked in an ideology for which we, our children and our grandchildren will pay a very grievous price.

Blue Ocean Event: Much Worse Than Predicted By The Models

Although I gladly yield expertise on the environmental and climate change files to my fellow blogger, The Disaffected Lib, who has been doing exemplary work these past several years, every so often I come across something that is a screaming indictment of world leaders who have been content to whistle past the graveyard while we plunge headlong toward irreversible climate change, change that will make life very difficult, if not impossible, for many of our children and grandchildren.

One of the blessings and, in some ways, curses, of using the Internet to seek out information that the mainstream media either declines to pursue or pays scant attention to is to feel a little like Cassandra, who was given the power of prophecy but destined to never be believed. I suspect the people who appear in the following presentation feel much like her as well.

What follows is the first press briefing of the Arctic Emergency Methane Group(AMEG) held on Dec. 4, 2014 at the 20th annual Conference of the Parties (COP 20) for the United Nation's Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Lima, Peru. You do not have to watch the entire video to appreciate the gravity of the situation as they discuss the accelerating pace of Arctic sea ice melting, and the consequences of that melt. In the words of presenter John Nissen, "All hell will break loose". His solution, however, may not sit well with everyone:

For Those Who Value Democracy

After watching Pierre Polievre make the Sunday rounds extolling his government's achievements, it would be easy for the politically disengaged and ignorant to conclude that the Harper regime is the greatest thing since the proverbial sliced bread. By Polievre's account, his government has put more money into the pockets of 'hardworking Canadians' than any other in Canada's history. What's not to like about TFSAs (a leg up for both working and retired seniors, according to trickster Pierre), income-splitting and new pending budget measures for seniors. All is well with the world.

Except that it is not. Scratch beneath the surface of such self-serving rhetoric and you will find a profoundly anti-democratic regime with barely concealed contempt for those who hold differing views, that latter considered one of the most important elements of any society that deems itself healthy and dynamic. The regime has used every trick at its disposal to demonize those dissenting voices as it extols a consumer-driven politics meant to turn us into a people who embrace mediocrity and absence of bold vision.

Although I have written about it many times, the Harper-directed CRA witch hunts make for a good illustration of the profoundly intolerant and anti-democratic nature of the Harper regime.

Steven Zhou writes:

If a democratic system thrives on participation from a civil society free to express itself without state intervention, then Canadian democracy could use some help these days.

Citizens who band together into groups that push politicians to engage a problem should, in theory, be a vital aspect of democratic decision-making. Yet the Harper administration, in its infinite political wisdom, has devoted millions of taxpayer dollars via Canada Revenue Agency, formerly Revenue Canada, to, in effect, target groups that are critical of federal policies.

The statistics paint a damning picture:

The CRA launched a series of 60 audits in 2012, and, tellingly, the targeted organizations all seem to espouse views that don't fit so well with the Harper agenda.

These 'political-activity audits' have primarily targeted environmental groups, human rights organizations, and labour-backed think tanks like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Meanwhile, more conservative-minded groups like the Manning Foundation or the Fraser Institute have not faced such aggression from the CRA. Many of them have also, like their leftist counterparts, participated in 'political activities.'

And this pattern holds true for the CRA's latest target:

[T]he latest charity to be targeted in a significant way is the United Steelworkers' Humanity Fund, a labour-backed organization that has supported food banks and disaster relief initiatives for over 30 years.

It has donated about two per cent of its annual revenue to the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability (CNCA), an umbrella organization that advocates for more accountability in the Canadian mining sector, among other things.

This support for the CNCA, an organization that hasn't shied away from its political purposes, is apparently what the CRA is zeroing in on. The fund has often butted heads with the Harper administration over labour issues, and wants more oversight of Canadian mining practices abroad, which, according to its president Ken Neumann, is primarily why the CRA began auditing the group's finances last year.

The intended purposes of such audits, of course, are to provoke both fear and self-censorship:

Such audits can certainly disrupt an organization's day-to-day operations significantly, but this kind of trouble isn't the main reason why these intrusions are bad for Canadian democracy in the long run. Targeted organizations that are forced to go through the lengthy auditing process can, whether the government intends it or not, become examples of what not to say or do in the Harper era.

One can hardly blame other charities if they decide to interpret the current inquisitorial atmosphere as being politically motivated. This means that if they want to keep their charitable status, practicing a degree of self-censorship may end up being totally rational. This is an anti-democratic development almost by definition, and it hardly matters whether a particular agenda is behind it all, though the available evidence suggests that Revenue Canada's choices aren't exactly politically neutral.

Will such practices, profoundly inimical to democracy, be noted by average Canadians, or will their vision be blinded by budget baubles designed to cultivate the selfish part of their natures?

I don't know the answer, but I do fear it.