Mark Carney’s Second Budget Reimagines Canada’s Place in the Global Economy
By Google News Category Global Economy ·
The Carney government has been in place for more than 600 days now, and with its second budget — a brick of a document weighing in at over 500 pages, portentously titled Masters of our Destiny/Maitres Chez Nous — there was no shortage of content to go through in the feverish hours of lockup before it was tabled in the House.
Yet, if the first budget of any government tells you what a prime minister hopes to accomplish with his mandate, the second budget is always instructive because it gives you a better sense of how the prime minister plans to get things done.
The foundations have now been established; this is, despite the familiarity of names in caucus and Cabinet, effectively and fully a transformed Liberal government.
The org charts in each Minister’s office have been filled from the admin assistants to the chiefs of staff. Those staffers who survived from the Trudeau era are gamely battling exhaustion, and the new ones coming in seem both overwhelmed and cautiously exhilarated, such is the pace of change and the focus on deliverables.
Crucial conversations on the art of the possible are approached with a new realism – and pragmatism regarding the timelines for project approval — and a stronger, clearer style of governing has emerged.
Just how different is the Carney government with its sophomore budget? It is instructive to look at Trudeau’s second for contrast.
That sophomore effort was notable for its projected $28.5 billion deficit, which implicitly confirmed the Liberals had reneged on their 2015 campaign promise to return to a balanced budget within four years. Trudeau’s team was betting big on the launch of the $950 million supercluster initiative, working with key sectors to jump start economic growth and innovation across the country.
A lot of grant farming ensued, along with an oversubscribed strategic innovation fund that would put some applicants in protracted processes with multiple committee reviews, all managed by harried and under-resourced department officials.
By 2019, adjusted for per-capita GDP, Canada ranked 19th out of 31 OECD countries for economic growth, behind such powerhouses as Ireland, Slovenia, and Hungary.
To be fair, all governments here in Canada have struggled to boost economic growth and productivity since the 90s (at least). The Superclusters represented a bold vision; however, the threading together of strong value chains, from proteins to scale AI, faced headwinds macroenomically — not least with the arrival of the COVID years, combined with the new protectionist trade policies from the US.
The impact of lockdown on our supply chains and the new, coarsened dialogue with Washington have made Carney’s case for long-term economic resilience and middle-power coalition building more convincing than any failure to launch of the Superclusters initiative.
By focusing on how Carney’s governing, this budget is, I’d argue, a second chapter that began less with his first budget than with the Investment Summit in September.
Carney’s approach to mastering Canada’s destiny is all about attracting investment for transformative infrastructure and energy development projects. It represents industrial policy that is more dirigiste than Canadians have seen since the days of C.D.
Howe, that postwar “Minister of Everything” who, through the lean years of the Depression all the way into the late 50s, led the scaling up of everything from crucial munitions supply to shipbuilding, turning Canada into a…
Originally published by Google News Category Global Economy
