Jim Flaherty’s relentlessly sunny disposition made an early March day feel like July yesterday.
“Defence spending will continue to grow [but] starting two years from now, it will grow more slowly,” the Finance Minister told MPs in the House of Commons.
“This year we will increase foreign aid to another record level,” he said, in tones as jaunty as his new hairdo. “Next year we will freeze spending at that level.”
That probably sounded quite reasonable to the military brass and non-governmental organizations that spend our foreign aid budget — at least it did until they checked the expected savings table buried deep in the budget plan.
The documents reveal that $2.5-billion has been lopped off the Department of National Defence’s anticipated budget and $4.5-billion less than expected will end up in the foreign aid budget over the next five years. The $364-million increase in international assistance this year must have seemed like a cruel joke by comparison.
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We are witnessing the beginning of the end of an era. The shrinking of the Ottawa/Montreal corridor of apparatchiks practicing nepotism, hiring their relatives into an ever bloated bureaucracy.
$6.8B is the amount of savings to be found through “containing the administrative cost of government”. No details provide yet other than a salary freeze and the already contracted 1.5% increase over the next few years negotiated with CUPE is to be “offset” elsewhere, presumably by attrition of the retiring baby boomers.
Is it relevant? The squawking of CUPE would indicate it must be real pain, although their threshold is low. Anyway, this is shrinkage instead of bureaucracy growth, the first time ever? This means less dead weight on the backs of the real economy. There is big trouble brewing as the end of an easy rider era of big government sinks in with CUPE.
The government has planned consultations with the 18 federal unions to come up with a “reasonable” compensation regime
The CUPE site says:
Instead of moving ahead with positive measures, this budget demonstrates that the Harper government has nothing more to offer but their failed laissez-faire approach of shrinking the public sector, cutting taxes, crossing their fingers and hoping that the private sector will make things better.
If CUPE hates the budget it must be a good one.
CUPE (just like the SEIU in the States) has become a cancer on this country.
To CUPE anything that isn’t completely unionized is “laissez-faire”. They either don’t know what they are talking about or they are being intentionally dishonest. I suggest the latter.
Well its official folks, Iggy likes the budget and will let it pass. But to make things look good for the lieberals, some of his puffins will vote against it but enough will stay away from the H of C to let it pass.
Now hows that for a slight of hand.
Let’s hope our political leaders never ever find themselves in the same position that Obama is in wherein they believe that they also must prostitute themselves and sell out their country to any union in order to win an election.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ1NJaCtIkM&feature=related
Well the federal tories came close to ‘prostituting themselves’ by making up to the unions and their employers with the massive financial bailout of two of Ontario’s american auto manufacturers, Chrysler & GM.