City Views

Print

E-mail

Text

What a disappointment. Just days after most of us learned what the word "prorogue" meant, Governor General Michaelle Jean used it in a sentence to give Stephen Harper's Conservative government nearly two months to crush the embryonic Liberal/NDP/Bloc coalition government-in-waiting.

This is a disappointment: for more than those many who despise the minority government led by Mr. Harper; those diminishing few who yearn for the untapped leadership potential of Liberal leader Stephane Dion; or those hardy anarchists hoping that a three-party coalition would finally give us a taste of what life might be like absent peace, order and good government.

For those many of us who would just like to see some old-fashioned Keynesian stimuli for an economy that is badly faltering, the decision to give Parliament a cooling-off period over Christmas also delayed what might have been the quickest route to robust federal infrastructure spending.

As beneficial as they may have been for national stability, the succession of single-party governments in Ottawa does not have a great record when it comes to giving it up for Toronto and the region. Liberals and Conservatives have all taken their turns paying middling-to-no attention to the city's infrastructure needs.

A coalition government, legally constituted, whose stated goal is spending all the money it can on infrastructure and other economic stimuli?

Excuse us, rest of Canada, for salivating at the prospect. Even if that prospect involves Stephane Dion, who has difficulty sending a videotape to television stations on time, as a prime minister. Really, it would not be a problem if a cheque to cover the $6-billion in hoped-for federal funding for Toronto's Transit City plan came a few minutes late. As the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S. has shown us, it takes a very limited amount of leadership talent to spend money on things and run up a lot of debt, and poor Mr. Dion is surely up to that task if nothing else.

Because here's the thing: government spending, specifically as it relates to infrastructure, should be the primary task of anyone leading this country at this time. Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty are correct in saying that Canada is going into this global financial crisis in relatively good shape. Turning a modest surplus into a modest deficit is good policy at this time. It not only gets you shiny new infrastructure, but it creates jobs.

Toronto, which is in considerably worse financial shape, has figured this out. Next week, council will be sifting through the mound of reports that make up its capital budget. Buried among them is a two-page briefing note from city finance staff that looks at the effects that capital budget will have on job creation over the next five and 10 years.

According to their model, the 10-year capital plan of $25.8-billion will create 297,000 new jobs: about 30,000 a year. The federal government can take a small amount of credit for that: it's funding projects in the budget to the tune of $3-billion, about the same amount as the provincial government over that time.

It's possible that over the holidays, Mr. Harper will complete the torturous epiphany that he embarked on this week, and discover his inner Keynesian. That is probably the best hope - although it's not likely any more realistic than the prospects that the Bloc, the NDP and the Liberals can hold strong until the House of Commons resumes in late January, and carry Mr. Dion to power then.