Look out Conservatives — big government is back, and Canadians like it
Posted on March 30, 2022 in Governance Debates
Source: TheStar.com — Authors: Susan Delacourt
TheStar.com – Politics/Provincial Politics
March 29, 2022. By Susan Delacourt, National Columnist
What happened to the idea that smaller government is better?
In the space of a little more than one week, Canadians have been put on notice that the country’s social-safety net is in the midst of a major expansion.
A child-care program that now covers all parts of the country; a dental-care plan that will be fully in place by 2025, as well as a pharmacare system still under construction — all have been unveiled by Justin Trudeau and various partners since last Tuesday.
Much of this social-program expansion will happen thanks to the new pact between Trudeau and the federal New Democrats. But the latest and ultimate part of the national child-care program comes as a result of collaboration between the federal Liberals and Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives.
“Forget the political stripes,” Ford said at Monday’s news conference with his good friends in Liberal Ottawa. “We’re all, federally and provincially, municipally, working for the people. That’s why we’re here, to make things better.”
Even Jean Charest, campaigning to be the next leader of the federal Conservative party, praised the child-care deal. “Accessible and affordable child care is a win for all Canadian families,” Charest posted on Twitter.
So this new, expanded social-safety net is painted in many political hues — red, orange and blue — and that raises an interesting question. What happened to the idea that smaller government is better? Wasn’t it Bill Clinton, a Democratic U.S. president, who declared in the mid-1990s that “the era of big government is over”?
Well, it’s back. Somewhere, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are spinning in their graves, as all of their 1980s crusades to present government as the enemy are relegated to ancient history.
The most obvious, immediate answer to the what-happened question is two years of COVID-19 and a global pandemic. It was hard to argue that government should be getting out of people’s lives when state-financed subsidies and vaccines were keeping money in pockets and people out of hospital.
Still, the need for subsidies and vaccines will eventually fade away. But the idea that government needs to be a force in Canadians’ lives has not, like it or not.
It should be said that Pierre Poilievre, the apparent front-runner in the Conservative leadership race, is doing his best to keep the Reagan-Thatcher idea alive. His leadership-campaign website is a litany of rants against governments and institutions and all the “gatekeepers” who stand in the way of freedom.
Yet even Poilievre has had to permit himself a measure of government interventionism. Two weeks ago, the freedom fighter promised he would be doing all he could to speed up licensing and training for immigrant professionals. How would Poilievre pull this off? By giving money to provinces and territories to speed up licensing and “study loans” for new Canadians who needed skills upgrading. So much for letting the market sort things out.
Thoughtful Conservatives have been talking for a while about where their old, small-government ideas fit in this new political era.
“Not only has the party lost consecutive elections, but the broader cultural, economic, and political context has significantly changed from the final days of the last Conservative government,” Sean Speer, former economic adviser to Stephen Harper, wrote in The Hub in February. “We’ve gone from every major political party supportive of balanced budgets as recently as 10 years ago to today’s new multi-partisan consensus in favour of larger and longer deficits. Something obviously changed.”
Trudeau’s Liberals are aware that the spending programs they are putting in place today are going to be difficult for any government to roll back. Yes, even a Pierre Poilievre government. The Liberals don’t talk about this explicitly, but many of the measures they’re trying to put in place are intended as a correction to the small-government mania that even seized their own party in the 1990s.
It was Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, remember, who balanced the budgets through large cuts to provincial transfers that paid for health and education. Trudeau is regularly reminded of that history when the provinces ask for more health-care financing. This prime minister won’t be remembered for such cuts; but he may well be remembered for an enlarged system of social spending.
A New Democrat mentioned this to me last week too, saying it’s now possible to envision a future where cutting child care would be as unthinkable as cutting health care — and dental care as part of that package.
When that future arrives, historians may point to the moment last week when Canada’s social-safety net was significantly, and quite possibly, permanently expanded.
https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2022/03/29/look-out-conservatives-big-government-is-back-and-canadians-like-it.html
Tags: budget, child care, economy, Health, pharmaceutical, standard of living
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