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If there's an early spring election in Canada, it likely won't be the result of a non-confidence vote as the Bloc Québécois quickly lined up Monday to support Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's "Everyman's Budget."
Even as the Liberal and NDP parties vowed to vote against the budget, Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe said his party will support it. He noted the provisions to fix the so-called fiscal imbalance result in a $3-billion plus chunk of change going to Quebec over three years.
Mr. Duceppe consulted with his political cousin, Parti Québécois Leader André Boisclair, before announcing his decision.
"We can't let $3.24-billion [slip] away. I'm pretty confident next Monday we will have a new [premier] in Quebec ... and a sovereigntist government will know what to do with that money," said Mr. Duceppe, referring to the tight three-way provincial election race.
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Quebec Liberal Leader Jean Charest, also hoping to get an electoral boost from the budget, said Quebeckers were clear winners: "The gains made by Quebeckers today are substantial," Mr. Charest said.
"This gives us a lot of satisfaction in the sense that we have fought for this for a number of years. Now the federal government has moved substantially and Quebeckers should be proud of the leadership we've exercised within the federation to accomplish this."
Other opposition parties, provincial leaders and special interest groups were less impressed.
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion immediately denounced it as "a bad budget." He said the Conservatives are simply restoring some of the money they cut previously in the areas of childcare, health care, provincial transfers and the environment.
"I've never seen a government do so little with so much," he said. NDP Leader Jack Layton agreed.
"As this budget stands, what will happen is that the prosperity gap in Canada is going to continue to widen. This is a series of steps backward.... It looks like the kitchen table got a few crumbs and the boardroom table got big corporate tax cuts."
Provincial premiers Lorne Calvert of Saskatchewan and Danny Williams of Newfoundland and Labrador slammed the budget as a "betrayal" because its cap on equalization payments undermines an earlier government promise to exclude from the formula all revenues from the sale of oil, gas and non-renewable natural resources, they said.
"There is a sense of betrayal, a sense of disappointment," said Mr. Williams.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation dismissed Mr. Flaherty's budget as a "Liberal spending budget," noting program spending will jump by 7.9 per cent from $175.2-billion to $189-billion — the third largest spending increase and the second largest jump in dollars since the federal budget was balanced in 1997-1998, the CTF said.
"Rather than reduce the overall tax burden, the Conservative government opted to spend down the federal surplus," said CTF federal director John Williamson.
Likewise, Bill Robson, president and CEO of the C.D. Howe Institute, said the surplus should have been used for federal tax relief, which he said would have done much more to cure the fiscal imbalance than billions more in grants and equalization top-ups.
"Canadians must steel themselves for more federal-provincial squabbles, and hope for more fundamental reforms in the years ahead," Mr. Robson said.
While he praised the government for meeting its own spending targets set in 2006, he warned, "the budget had none of the broad tax-rate reductions needed to erode Ottawa's role as Canada's dominant tax collector."
Other critics said Mr. Flaherty's budget doesn't spend enough, especially on high-profile areas such as municipalities, post-secondary education, and the fight against climate change.
While the Conservative government's shotgun approach to spending appears to cover a wide swatch of middle Canada, the budget does nothing to address pressing environmental concerns such as climate change, the Sierra Club of Canada said.
"The budget includes no coherent comprehensive climate plan," said Sierra Club executive director Stephen Hazell. "There was no funding for a climate trading regime, no new funding for climate change science and no new funding to expand the government's regulatory team."
Mr. Hazell said Mr. Flaherty deserves some credit for introducing a rebate on fuel efficient and hybrid cars, not to mention the levy on gas guzzlers, but he cautioned the tax measures won't likely be large enough to alter consumer buying habits.
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May dismissed the budget's environmental provisions as the language of public relations, noting targets to reduce greenhouse gasses remain unchanged. "This really spells a disaster for the climate," Ms. May said.
Meanwhile, even as the budget address the so-called fiscal imbalance among provinces, it does little to fix the "municipal fiscal imbalance," said Winnipeg city councillor Gord Steeves, acting president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.
Mr. Steeves praised the government's plan to extend the transfer of the gas tax for another four years, but he stressed cash-strapped cities and towns are plagued by a $60-billion deficit for roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects. Mr. Steeves said there is no long-term strategy to meet other municipal challenges like transit funding and immigration settlement.
Amanda Aziz, national chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students, said overall spending on post-secondary education will be about $1-billion short of 1992 levels, despite the modest increase in Monday's budget.
— with files by Canadian Press
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