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Federal budget contains no tangibles: Hoback

Feb 28, 2018 | 4:00 PM

Prince Albert’s MP is dissing Tuesday’s federal budget for what he calls its lack of tangibles.

Conservative Randy Hoback said the document, which puts the federal budget over $18 billion in deficit for 2018, offers very little other than pushing the Liberal agenda.

“For the most part it looks like it’s going straight into making the bureaucracy bigger and creating new government programs,” Hoback told paNOW. “There’s nothing that’s going to help that water treatment plant that’s required in the community, or lift stations, or things that are going to improve the quality of lives for people in Prince Albert.”

Hoback criticized the big spending and its lack of specifics, saying usually budgets offer funding elements for agriculture or the military and such.

“You’d usually see spending on a variety of different things that are priorities for governments but none of that stuff is there,” he said. “It’s all about what things they want to accomplish and what they want to accomplish is broad.”

One of the federal budget elements that has attracted wide attention is the move towards possibly creating a national pharmacare program. The government announced a feasibility study into such an initiative but Hoback is questioning the Liberal’s health care priorities.

“It might sound like a good idea until you start looking at the whole pile of problems in medical care right now,” Hoback said. “We have wait lists that need to be brought down and we can’t get family doctors. Before we start something new shouldn’t we shore up what we have and make sure it’s working and meeting the needs of Canadians before you start working on something else?”

Hoback reserved some of his fiercest criticism for what he called “the bullying tactics” of Ottawa and how Saskatchewan was “being picked on”. He was speaking to the threat of $62 million in infrastructure money being withheld if this province does not sign on to a national climate change plan. Hoback said Saskatchewan had a climate change plan that works for this province because “it wasn’t made in Ottawa” and yet federal money was being put into provincial jurisdictions signaling “the federal government’s priorities were twisted.”

PC Party reaction

Meanwhile the PC Party of Saskatchewan is disappointed that agriculture and rail transportation were not mentioned in yesterday’s federal budget.

In a media release, PC Party Leader Rick Swenson said “Finance Minister Morneau called his budget one of ‘equality and growth,’ sadly, for grain producers across western Canada, there is neither equality nor growth in this budget”.

Chamber concerned about overly-optimistic projections

The CEO of the Prince Albert and District Chamber of Commerce said there are key concerns with Tuesday’s federal budget. 

Kelvin Pankiw notes billions of dollars are going into social programs but with a big deficit the feds appear ill-prepared for a period of rising interest rates or other economic stresses from the US.

“The growing trend of protectionism and uncertainty over the outcome of NAFTA negotiations [is a concern],” Pankiw said. “We’re also concerned with higher than expected interest rates and just a lack of tax competitiveness in the face of recent US tax reform.”

The federal government has announced a projected deficit of just over $18 billion this year and the expectation of shaving around $167 million a year off that for the next five years. That would see Ottawa still in the red to the tune of over $12 billion by 2022.

Pankiw added with only a one percentage point reduction in Canada’s growth rate things could get even tougher in terms of paying off the deficit.

“That would increase the budget deficit by $3 billion. The projections I feel are overly optimistic,” he said.

Pankiw said while he supported initiatives in the budget like a new $105 million Women Entrepreneurship Strategy to promote women-led businesses, the big issue was a lack of support for Canadian companies as a whole.

“Making Canadian companies more profitable is the way to lower the unemployment rate,” he said. “When you lower unemployment you increase the tax base and then you have more money available for programs.”

 

glenn.hicks@jpbg.ca

On Twitter:@princealbertnow