Missing The Penny

We're always on tenterhooks when a new budget is brought down. This time, a federal budget, carefully put together by a majority Conservative government, two days after the provincial Ontario budget was brought down. Ontario is in dire financial straits, with a burdening and burgeoning debt and hefty deficit. Whereas the country as a whole, driven by the federal government, is in fairly secure shape, yet with its own relatively modest deficit to be tamed.

Canada came out of the world-wide recession in fairly good shape, famously. While the PIGS - Portugal, Italy, Grace and Spain - have experienced real recessionary pain, whose legacy is true austerity, high unemployment, rising debt costs and dwindling social services. The Harper government keeps reminding us how fortunate we are.

Of course, we'd likely have no deficit at all had the federal government of a Conservative government which it is, adhered more seriously to fiscal conservatism.

On the other hand, that's not the Canadian way; social services are simply too important to us as a whole. And, as a wealthy country, endowed with vast natural resources that drive our trade machine, we can afford those social programs that mean so much to us. One of which has just had a crimp put in it, the Old Age Security program.

It's a crimp, not a fatal bite, and we'll weather it. Despite clawbacks geared to income, perhaps a further restructuring could make it less universal in nature, and more geared to responding to the needs of seniors whose situation reveals a meager income. There are federal government departmental cutbacks, some fairly substantial, and cut-backs in federal civil servant positions.

Those cutbacks, however, still will not reflect the rates that were present when the Conservatives first came to power. It can be argued that since the population, mostly through a generous intake of immigrants is steadily growing, and thus there is a concomitant requirement for the public service to grow as well, but there is also a lot of overlap and redundancy.

Such as is seen in a wide array of governmental IT services, which to be more economically feasible, should be consolidated and integrated. And that process has begun. Federal civil servants, with their pot of gold at the end of their rainbow employment in the form of defined benefits in their retirement, will also be paying a higher proportion into their retirement funds.

It's too bad that Members of Parliament and the Senate will not as immediately be paying more into their own retirement funds, and looking at a lengthier period before entitlement than having served six years; their golden parachute is somewhat excessive. Various government departments will have a bit of a struggle to accommodate their needs to a smaller budget, but they will manage.

The CBC for all its moaning and groaning will manage to get by despite the modest-enough reduction in its financial underpinnings. Its value to Canadians is far less now than it once was, and what it receives to keep it gloriously afloat should reflect that; they might want to return to the basics of expressing views amenable to all Canadians on all sides of the political spectrum - or not.

It remains to be seen whether we'll miss the penny.