Needed: the political will to subtract
JEFFREY SIMPSON
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Oct. 08, 2011
The Ontario election is mercifully over. The campaign’s fanciful inventions are past, to say nothing of the studied flight from hard choices.
Very soon, because it’s their job, senior civil servants will tell the new government either what its leadership knew but was too scared to reveal or didn’t know because it actually believed campaign rhetoric: Ontario is in the fiscal soup.
When governments find themselves needing to cut expenditures, they apparently dare not say so during an election campaign for fear of scaring voters. So what happens shortly after a campaign is that the new government calls in outside experts.
In Nova Scotia, the new NDP government summoned a group of experts, even from outside the province, to review the accounts. The group told the NDP what it ought to have known: The fiscal cupboard was bare.
In Ottawa, the Harper government is paying a king’s ransom to a consulting firm to help it identify how to cut spending. This effort began, predictably, after the last federal campaign.
In Ontario, the Liberal government actually appointed renowned public policy economist Don Drummond to study spending patterns before the election, but then said nothing about the exercise during the campaign. Attacking the province’s fiscal challenge will be harder still with the kind of minority government Ontarians elected on Thursday.
These review exercises – outside experts to advise on internal cuts – will all fail without the fundamental political will to do the most difficult thing in government: eliminate or curtail existing programs.
Private-sector enterprises constantly monitor themselves for efficiencies, redundancies and programs that have outlived their usefulness. In the public sector, however, this kind of search is episodic, if it happens at all.
Governments, except in isolated cases, are in the business of adding, not subtracting, programs. They puncture the tax system with credits and other forms of tax expenditures; they add new spending programs, or enrich existing ones. These new policies are sometimes vital, but the instinct to pay for them by making hard choices elsewhere is seldom apparent.
Around these tax expenditures or programs are grafted people and organizations that benefit from them. The exercise of government discretion then becomes an entitlement in the eyes of the beneficiaries, and entitlements, in turn, become so entrenched they’re difficult to end or curtail.
Ask yourself: Which politician, regardless of party, ever held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to announce the end of something? Rather than systematically making choices about cutting something old to pay for something new, the political imperative is to just add something new. And this applies to all parties, including conservatives who promise smaller government but invariably deliver bigger government.
When the fiscal situation gets bad, governments call in the outsiders, as Nova Scotia, Ottawa and Ontario have done. But the best expert advice goes for naught without one critical factor: the political will to cut or curtail programs. Trimming here and there, dreaming of “administrative savings” or “eliminating waste and duplication” won’t suffice if a government needs large savings.
The Conservative government in Ottawa and the Liberal government in Toronto, like governments across Canada for the most part, have shown no inclination to cut or curtail programs (except for the Ontario Liberal attack on pharmacy pricing). Programs go on and on, without people asking whether they serve any compelling purpose.
Examples are legion, but consider just one from the federal government. The Mulroney government created the Western Economic Diversification Canada program, a regional development agency. Western Canada is booming. It doesn’t need such a program, but there’d be political hell to pay if it were disbanded because people in that region would think they were losing something they deserve even though the policy rationale for the program disappeared long ago.
Rather than disbanding the fund and using the money elsewhere or saving the money altogether, the Harper government set up new funds with fresh money for the Far North and Southern Ontario. Now, the entire country is covered by such agencies, a classic example of adding without subtracting.