The Federal Budget - Lots of spending. Very little saving.

The Federal Conservatives have learned how to spend, but not how to save.

The easy part of budgeting is spending. The much tougher part is saving. The budget delivered today, is long on spending but very, very short on saving. In my view it does not pass the expectations we should have for this budget.

While there is general agreement on the need to spend dollars on critical infrastructure projects in this budget, and the budget has provided many examples of helpful and needed spending, the budget falls far short when it comes to providing leadership on saving dollars.

You might ask “How should the budget have approached saving dollars?” and “Why is this important?”

First it is important for the budget to tell Canadians how it will save dollars – both today’s dollars and future dollars. This is just as important as telling us how the government will spend dollars to help individual Canadians and to keep the economy going. Indeed, in the long run, to return to a balanced budget, it is essential for the government to have a plan to save on expenditures as well as to make new expenditures.

There are many many options for the government when it comes to saving dollars. Some options however, are much less acceptable in times of economic difficulty. Thus the government should not today be looking at laying off people as a way of saving dollars because this will only exacerbate the hardship of Canadians at an already difficult time. Scraping pay equity is also not acceptable.

However, there are still many other alternatives. Let me provide one example I have been talking about for years. Health care costs are rising very fast. One of the reason that health care costs are rising rapidly is that we have an epidemic of diabetes in Canada. This diabetes epidemic is running like a wild fire across our country. It is ravaging the lives of people who are affected. People with diabetes are losing legs, losing eyesight, losing kidneys and losing their lives prematurely. The epidemic is ravaging government budgets as well.

As one area of improvement, this budget could have included a real plan to turn the diabetes epidemic around. Such a plan, implemented with urgency, could have helped Canadians health in a major way and would have resulted in a dramatic saving of future health care dollars on dialysis, on heart surgery, on limb amputation surgery, on drugs, on health clinic and doctors visits, and on hospital costs.

Why was there no emphasis on savings in this budget? In my view this budget fell short of what was needed in part because it spent like there was no tomorrow, yet failed to save dollars when there are plenty of wise options to do so. In taking this approach, the government has chosen a short term fix rather than plan sensibly for the short and long term.