Bill Morneau’s centre-left budget puts Tom Mulcair’s NDP in a bind

If the Liberals become standard-bearers for the centre-left, what remains for the NDP to do?

Thestar.com
March 24, 2016
By Thomas Walkom

There are many winners in Tuesday’s budget, ranging from middle-income families with children to poor seniors to university researchers.

But there is one clear loser - Tom Mulcair’s New Democratic Party.

With this budget, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has confirmed that its veer to the left during last fall’s election campaign was not just a fleeting tactic.

It seems the Liberals plan to position themselves as standard-bearers of the centre-left. They hope to be known as the party of activist government and, when necessary, big government.

And the NDP? After years of moving rightward in order to capture votes, it now faces the prospect of being seriously outflanked on the left.

In the wake of Tuesday’s budget, Mulcair could complain only that the Liberals have not yet done enough to meet their own campaign promises.

That’s a fair enough criticism. But it ignores the fact that had the NDP won the election and implemented its campaign promise to balance the books regardless of circumstance, the federal government would have been able to do even less.

Meanwhile, others on the centre-left were far more complimentary towards the Liberals.

Writing in the Star, Peter Bleyer and Trish Hennessey of the leftish Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives lauded Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s first budget for putting the federal government back into the business of economic leadership.

On files ranging from poverty reduction to infrastructure investment to battling inequality, the pair said, the government is finally acting.

“It (the budget) is hardly perfect,” they wrote. “But it’s more balanced in terms of public priorities than any federal budget in a long time.”

The left-leaning Broadbent Institute (named for former NDP leader Ed Broadbent) was more critical, taking the Liberals to task for their failure to raise corporate taxes and close tax loopholes.

But it, too, welcomed elements announced in the budget, particularly the new means-tested Canada Child Benefit.

So far, the NDP strategy for dealing with Trudeau appears to be based on the premise that over time the Liberals will remain true to form - that their dalliance with the left was merely a tactic to win power and that once in government they will show their true colours.

Certainly, that’s what history suggests. Jean Chretien’s Liberal government was elected in 1993 on a platform to create jobs and build infrastructure. Yet two years later, that same Liberal government embarked on a series of savage spending cuts that gutted welfare, crippled the employment insurance system and slashed medicare.

Perhaps Trudeau will mimic Chretien eventually. But so far, there is no sign of that.

Going into this budget, the Liberals were presented with a clear choice: They could keep their ambitious spending promises, or they could keep their pledge to limit deficits to $10 billion a year. The weak economy meant they couldn’t do both.

That the Liberals chose spending over fiscal constraint is telling. It signals that they think their political future lies with voters who are not content to wait for economic benefits to trickle down from the top.

At the same time, Trudeau’s government is doing little to lure centre-right voters away from the Conservatives. It’s indicative that in this budget, Morneau casually axed a planned small-business tax cut.

If the Liberals have indeed decided to position themselves more permanently to the left of centre, the New Democrats will be in a quandary. Many of their policies, such as the call for universal pharmacare, do differ from those of the Liberals. But the NDP’s current affection for balanced budgets, market forces and small business disguises this fact.

As a result, many voters find it hard to figure out exactly what the modern NDP is and what it stands stand for.

A lot of New Democrats get this. Those who favour the somewhat vague Leap manifesto, which calls for a re-thinking of the entire economy in light of climate change and aboriginal issues, are looking for a way to re-inspire the NDP.

“When a party such as the NDP forgets why it exists, its constituents desert,” political scientist Duncan Cameron wrote on rabble.ca this week.

That’s particularly true when another centre-left party, in this case the Liberal party, is actively wooing.