In the year 2525...

....the Liberal government has allocated $1.94 trillion dollars for interstellar highway repairs.
Okay, so that wasn't part of this budget, but damn it, it might as well have been. Pretty much everything else was in there, packaged in such a way as to appeal to the wide spectrum of Canadians who haven't quite mastered the fine art of thinking for themselves...not to mention the science of telling time.
Sadly, Stephen Harper seems to be one of that group. "There's certainly nothing in here that justifies calling an election", he says. "This budget's priorities are Conservative priorities", he says.

By Coservative priorities, Harper means tax cuts and defense spending. Harper and Goodale must be working from a different definition of the word "priority". Yes, Finance Minister Goodale has cut your taxes...by $16 for this year for the average Canadian. Don't spend that all in one place, okay? As for revitalizing our decrepit Armed Forces, the government has pledged $12.8 billion over five years to this cause. That sounds like a lot--it's the net worth of seven or eight NHL team owners, or about a quarter of Bill Gates' portfolio--but in reality, a goodish chunk of it is just money already promised being moved around. The majority of the genuine new spending is slated for four or five years from now. That's plenty of time to change, well, everything.

WHY do governments do budgets five or seven years ahead? Do they honestly think those numbers mean something?

My wife does budgets six months in advance. I think this is pretty sensible. We've got a pretty good idea where we are right now and where we'll be in half a year. Sure, we've sat down and discussed a five year plan, but doing an actual budget that far ahead is almost an exercise in random number generation.
It's even worse if you're a government. There is, quite simply, no way of knowing where your economy will be in five years. It could be booming, for sure, but it could just as easily be in the crapper. And the chances of PM still being P.M. in 2009 are...what's that thing that controls my television? Oh yeah, "remote".
This budget is actually a trial election platform. That's all it is, nothing less and certainly nothing more. Minority governments rarely last their full terms. This one admittedly could, because the Bloc has a vested interest in the status quo. But I wouldn't bet too many after-tax dollars on it.

So, as election platform, how does this stack up?

On the surface, it looks pretty good, doesn't it? The government has promised to spend lots and lots of your dollars, and in ways you've been baaa-ing about. Overall spending is up 11.8% and will keep rising through this five year plan the Liberals would like us to pretend we're locked in to. Four point three billion for health care. No specifics, at least none I've been able to locate, but hey, it's for health care! We like health care, right?
Five billion over five years for a national child care program. Pardon me for being a bit paranoid here, but after HRDC, the gun registry and Adscam, the last thing we need is a brand-spanking-new bureaucracy whisking our children away to become good little Liberals. (On second thought, "spanking"' is probably an ill-advised choice of words.)
I have a real problem with the notion of a national daycare system. I think the government would be much better off devising ways to allow parents to raise their own children. A huge majority of parents would do so "if they could afford it", according to a recent poll. My belief is that many people can't afford not to raise their kids themselves, but that's just me talking. Regardless, handing our kids over to Big Government to raise brings us one step closer to a Brave New World that I for one would just as soon not contemplate.

Goodale has, as I've said, effected some extremely modest tax relief for individuals, most of it for once upon a future time, far, far away. He's done the same thing for corporations, but our companies are still among the most heavily taxed in the free world. Way to goose the economy, boys. Good job.

There's money for Kyoto, too. Like everything else, there's money but no plan. I am not one of those people you've heard lately who say Kyoto is junk science, that it's a huge waste of time and money, that since the United States hasn't signed on there's no sense in anyone else doing so. Meeting the Kyoto Protocol would be a great way of thinking globally and actling locally, and who cares what anyone else does or doesn't do? We'd be doing our part. Despite the whining of Rick Mercer, nobody's actually told us what our part is, but what the heck, the plan we don't have only came into effect last week.

Lifting the 30% foreign content cap on RRSPs is about the only unqualified good thing Goodale's done. I'm all for investing in Canada, so long as Canada's worth investing in. (As an aside, I object to an artificially low dollar for much the same reason. Too many companies use it as a crutch.)

That's all for this year. Wait until next year, when everything will change!