Your side survived a near-death experience late last year when the governor-general agreed to prorogue Parliament rather than turn over the levers of power to a coalition of Liberals and New Democrats propped up by separatist MPs from Quebec.
Equally uplifting, the side has just brought down a deficit-laden budget that has been nearly universally praised as being just what the country needs at this moment of economic peril.
The cheering section includes the corporate leadership of the country, most of the think-tanks, provincial politicians, with the notable exceptions of Premier Danny Williams of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Quebec's Jean Charest, a good number of prominent newspaper columnists and other media voices, and municipal representatives.
Everyone has their price, it seems, and the government is going to do a dandy job doling out dollars over the next two years to as many groups, regions, special interests and stakeholders as possible.
We'll be spending billions on infrastructure, automakers, the forestry industry, the unemployed, arts and culture, green technology and goodness knows what else, all in the name of stimulating the economy it order to mitigate the impact of the recession.
This is nothing more than a 9-1-1 budget. It is an emergency response to a crisis, cooked up by a government that was spooked by its opponents and besieged on all sides by cries for help. It will soothe the nerves of a populace that has been badly rattled by a deluge of bad news about bank failures, tightening credit markets, plummeting stock prices and, increasingly, large-scale layoffs.
It buys us a few months of breathing space in which local and provincial governments can begin rolling out infrastructure projects and putting people to work building or repairing roads, bridges, sewers and other hard assets.
It buys us time to figure out just how deep and painful this recession is going to be. We have been inundated in recent months by dire and even apocalyptic warnings that the next great depression is upon us.
The collapse of the Wall Street investment banks last fall, the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S. and the turmoil on world stock markets were all deeply disturbing. On the other hand, we are not facing runaway inflation, high interest rates or double-digit unemployment, all of which can seriously erode the earnings and sense of well-being of ordinary people.
The budget buys us a few months of political peace in this country because the Liberals have supported it, meaning the government will survive and we will be spared an election that nobody wants.
We can only hope that the leadership in the country uses this lull in the action wisely. Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals have a set of policies and programs to ensure the long-term prosperity of the country and they are sorely needed.
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians, mainly in Ontario, have lost high-paying manufacturing jobs over the past several years - well before we were hit by all the turmoil of recent months. These are not temporary losses. Those positions are not coming back.
Take the auto industry for example. As recently as 1995, the Canadian Auto Workers and their American brethren, the United Auto Workers, produced slightly more than 13 million vehicles in North America, which accounted for 79 per cent of total sales on the continent that year. In 2008, combined CAW/UAW production amounted to just over eight million vehicles or 50 percent of sales and this year their output is expected to fall to 6.3 million.
Today, there are nearly 30 non-unionized plants in North America operated by so-called foreign domestics such as Toyota and Nissan. They make better cars and their labour costs are much lower due to the pension plans and health benefits of CAW and UAW members.
Likewise, workers in dozens of other industries have been laid off because manufacturers are moving production offshore to take advantage of cheaper labour in Asia and elsewhere. And those low-paid workers are producing sophisticated, high-quality goods.
Jobs disappear permanently when industries lose their competitive advantage. Governments cannot solve these problems with deficit spending, infrastructure projects or by extending employment insurance benefits. Nor should they erect barriers at our borders to protect domestic labour, as some union leaders have suggested.
Our political parties should be drawing upon the best thinking in business, industry, academia and the think-tanks. They should be developing pro-active economic policies to ensure that our economy remains open, competitive, productive and innovative.
The party that does that will be getting my vote next time around.
(D'Arcy Jenish can be reached at jenish@businessedge.ca)
