Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has mused that recession and the economic crisis could push the budgetary deficit for the 2009-10 fiscal year to $30 billion. The NDP's Jack Layton, leader of Canada's utopian left, has been demanding a national child-care program and billions for social housing.
Freshly acclaimed Liberal chieftain Michael Ignatieff issued the following stern warning on CTV's Question Period: "It is extremely important for Mr. Harper to understand that if he doesn't produce a budget that is in the national interest of Canada, he's going to lose a vote of confidence at the end of January."
All this manoeuvring for political pole position should make the voters nervous. Here's why. It will likely lead to a budget in which a minority government desperate to survive allows expedience to trump wisdom and opts for Band-Aids rather than an economic blueprint.
If we get the former (expedience and Band-Aids), then we can expect a repeat of the fiasco in Ontario in the early 1990s when an inept NDP government tried to prime the economy with great gobs of cash, ran up a $10-billion deficit and achieved next to nothing.
What the country sorely needs is a dash of political wisdom and an economic blueprint that addresses long-term strategic goals and structural needs. One of the most acute problems facing the Canadian economy today is the shortage of skilled workers in industries as diverse as construction, manufacturing and hospitality.
For months now, the news has been full of stories about plant closures, layoffs and job losses, mostly in manufacturing in southern Ontario. The flip side of this story - and it has been buried in the back pages or ignored altogether - is that dozens of employers across the country can't find the workers they need.
According to Paul Charette, chairman of the Canadian Construction Association (CCA), which represents companies involved in all sectors of building except housing, the CCA's member companies will need to recruit and train some 265,000 skilled workers between now and 2016.
The mining industry has projected that it will have to fill 92,000 high-skill positions over the next decade. Trucking companies estimate that they will need 37,000 new drivers per year for the next five years. Other industries, including retail, advanced technology and hospitality, are just as hard-pressed.
These shortages are already causing problems for the affected industries. "There is an increasing number of delays in finishing construction projects," Charette says. "There has also been a significant increase in building costs, often because wage rates are soaring. The average cost of a typical building increased 14 percent between the third quarter of 2006 and the third quarter of 2007."
The needs have become so acute in so many different sectors that 17 national associations have formed the Investing in Skills Coalition to convince the federal and provincial governments that they must act.
As Charette points out, employers of skilled labour are facing a number of challenges which they alone cannot surmount. The aging of the Canadian population means that a massive number of people will be retiring over the next decade and taking their skills with them. A decades-long decline in the birthrate means that there are not enough young people to replace them.
Immigration is no solution because most Western European countries - once a reliable source of skilled workers - are facing the same demographic dilemma as Canada.
Public attitudes also work against industries in need of skilled labour. "The real problem we have is Baby-Boomer parents who insist that their kids go to university," says Charette. "They think that's the only type of post-secondary education that will lead to a good career."
As this new year begins, thousands of Canadians are nervous about their jobs. But to date, the crisis in employment has largely been limited to southern Ontario's manufacturers.
What we need is concerted government action to move surplus blue-collar, assembly-line workers to sectors of the economy that are facing massive and sometimes crippling shortages of labour.
This will involve public education and awareness campaigns, retraining programs and large investments in the community colleges that offer technical training and programs. These are all long-term initiatives that will not pay a political dividend in the short term.
As MPs return to Ottawa this month, they'll be looking for quick fixes to jolt the economy. My bet is we'll get budgetary Band-Aids rather than an economic blueprint. We'll get lots of splashy spending, a big deficit and precious little in the way of real results.
(D'Arcy Jenish can be reached at jenish@businessedge.ca)
