This year’s budget speech should be different

TORONTO—Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and her officials are likely busy finalizing Budget 2023 so that it can be ready for Parliament and the public next month. But this year’s budget speech should be different. Ideally, a budget speech would honestly confront the country with the serious, longer-term challenges and disruptions we face, and would spell out what these mean for Canadians. The budget would ideally show how these things will be addressed, and in a way that Canadians can trust to be fair to all. Unfortunately, it is rare for budget speeches to do this. Instead, our finance ministers too often pretend we can live the impossible dream: improving public services while lowering taxes. Given the challenging issues we face, in the 2023 budget Freeland should skip the empty rhetoric of the sort she made in her 2021 fiscal outlook where she promised that the Trudeau government would “ensure that there are good, sustainable jobs for Canadians in every corner of the country for decades to come.” Really? A budget speech should be something more serious, treating Canadians as adults. These are the challenges we face: the impact of new technologies on jobs and work; far-reaching threats from climate change; geo-economic stresses from the rise of China and other emerging powers; the implications of an aging society; excessive inequality in wealth and incomes; the urgent need to improve our innovation and higher productivity growth; the disruptive challenges in decarbonizing the economy; the failure to build sufficient and affordable housing; and the obligation to ensure opportunity for all and support and a decent life for those unable to work. So we must be able to act collectively. As a country, we cannot afford today to do all the things we need or want to do and, without change, this will become even truer in the future. Getting the analysis and policies right, as the 2023 federal budget must do, is critical, but this won’t be enough. We must also rebuild public trust with a shared social contract that will allow Canadians to accept and work for disruptive and even painful change. This is a major challenge for our political, business, and academic communities which have, in recent years, eroded public trust, making meaningful change extraordinarily difficult. This is the missing link in working for positive change. I would argue that the lack of such trust in Canada today is a major stumbling block. We have too many divisive forces at play. We urgently need a sense of shared citizenship and a positive patriotism that takes pride in our country. Instead, we have a political environment that divides Canadians by engaging in identity politics, pitting groups of Canadians against one another and too often depicting our country as a failure, not a success. To make matters even worse, our national and provincial politicians have encouraged regionalism, pitting different parts of the country against other parts for short-term electoral advantage. In his sweeping analysis of the challenges and threats facing the Western democracies, the widely respected financial writer Martin Wolf in his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, argues that the greatest strengths of a country tend to come from patriotism, buttressed by a widely-shared prosperity, shared trust in the rules of the game, and confidence that the government will be competent in its most fundamental responsiveness. But at the core is patriotism, which Wolf defines as “a shared attachment to place, history, values, and culture” and which he argues is “the most powerful source of the needed sense of common identity.” It is this patriotism that identity politics undermines because it seeks to exploit and magnify whatever may divide us and create enemies among fellow-citizens. Instead of unifying leadership to get things done, we have politicians opportunistically pursuing divisive identity politics for short-term advantage making it much harder to accomplish change. This is why identity politics constitutes a most serious threat to Canada’s future. Canadians generally support any effort to create opportunity for all regardless of race, gender, sexual preference, or any other source of discrimination, with the demolition of any systemic barriers. Compared to past decades, we have made much progress on many issues, greatly expanding the role of women in all aspects of society, protecting gay rights and same-sex marriage, targeted supports for disadvantaged groups and at last addressing the needs of our Indigenous population. We have entrenched rights in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, established hate-crime legislation and acted against many past forms of discrimination. To be sure, there is more to do. And we will. Equality of opportunity can be a positive goal and reinforce our shared citizenship and patriotism. But identity politics is divisive since it requires identifying and blaming others, with all the distortions and venom this generates. What resonated most with me, in Wolf’s book is his emphasis on citizenship. “The renewal of capitalism and democracy must be animated by a simple, but powerful idea: that of citizenship,” Wolf writes. “We cannot just think as consumers, workers, business owners, savers, or investors. We must think as citizens. This is the tie that binds people together in a free and democratic society.” It is this tie that identity politics destroys. Wolf outlines three criteria for his idea of citizenship: The ability of fellow-citizens to have fulfilled life; the desire to create an economy that enables citizens to flourish in this way; and loyalty to democratic political and legal institutions and the values of open debate and mutual tolerance that are the foundation of these institutions. While the onus will be on Freeland to come up with a budget that is designed to take us forward to something better, if we are to successfully deal with disruptive change, our political, business, and academic communities must double-down to restore patriotism and build a unifying sense of citizenship. It is only through collective action, based on a high level of trust, that we will build a better future. David Crane can be reached at crane@interlog.com. The Hill Times