Editorial: Budget shows Grits fresh out of ideas

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If you’ve run out of money, borrow some more.

If you can’t borrow some more, print some more.

If you can’t print some more, tax some more.

This is the coda of Canada’s tired, unpopular Liberal government. The budget tabled Tuesday was remarkable in its lack of vision or common sense. For all the Grits’ recent talk of pivoting to address our country’s major challenges, this is just more of the same.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland did say one very correct thing in her budget speech: Namely that we, today’s taxpayers, need to pay our own way – instead of passing “a ballooning debt on to our children.”

Yet most people, faced with a counsel to pay down debt (or at least avoid new debt), take it as a call to control spending. Not this government: By its choices, fixing the federal balance sheet will have to be a problem for someone else.

This budget’s cardinal move – i.e. hiking the capital gains tax, with a focus on corporations, trusts and high earners – will not close the structural gap Liberal overspending has created. For all the trouble of hiking this tax instrument, it still pales in comparison to the deficit.

Perhaps this is why NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh – whose favour the Liberals have been seeking for the last three years – was so fast to dismiss the move as weak and insufficient. To him, taxing the “super rich” isn’t just supposed to pay for a fraction of deficit spending, but to fix everything including grocery prices.

The Liberals insist the targets of their tax grab are a fraction of one per cent of the population. Maybe so. But the point isn’t really how many people are individually affected; instead, we need to look at the likely implications for all Canadians.

Even if you agree with some of the Liberals’ initiatives, an extra $6.5 billion is not going to meaningfully move the needle on a $480 billion budget.

But what the tax hike may do is send even more of a message that Canada solves its problems by squeezing out more revenue, instead of growing the economy. It’s a cliche, but it’s true that no country can tax its way into prosperity.

With our productivity a shambles, we really can’t afford any more signals that our country is unworthy of investment. As growth declines, everyone will see the impacts downstream – including provinces like ours who rely on federal transfers to provide services.

This budget was the Liberals’ last chance to show they were up to the challenge of governing. They’ve offered a damp squib.