The 2003 Federal Budget: Conflicting Tensions

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Some federal budgets have been really exciting. That of 1963 led to
Walter Gordon’s downfall as Canada’s minister of finance. John
Crosbie’s 1979 budget provoked a vote of non-confidence in the House
of Commons and the end of Joe Clark’s brief government. The budget of
2003 was not in the same league. Introduced by an experienced government
with a parliamentary majority, there was no doubt about its fate.
Competent writers can write a book with appeal for economists and
economic historians, but the appeal for others is at best limited.

That said, the 2003 budget was the first for Finance Minister Ralph
Goodale and the last for Prime Minister Jean Chrétien; hence, it was a
landmark in its own right. In the words of Globe and Mail columnist
Jeffrey Simpson, that budget was necessarily Chrétien’s “budget
legacy,” as he knew that his months in office were numbered. The 20
contributors to this volume, most of whom are journalists or professors,
are certainly competent, and what they say has to be taken seriously.
However, they are not always right. Professor Ross McKitrick from the
Department of Economics at the University of Guelph predicted that the
Kyoto Protocol on climate change would not become international law
because neither the United States nor Russia would approve it. In his
introduction, Queen’s University Professor Thomas J. Courchene
“confirmed” that McKitrick was right, “that Kyoto would fail
because the Russians would not ratify it.” However, the Russians
ratified it in 2004, and it has become international law.

There is even some humour. Frances Woolley of Carleton University
ridicules the standard applied by Canadian census-takers in determining
who is “bilingual.” Some 18 percent of Canadians claim to be, she
says, but the government asks only “if a person is able to carry out a
conversation in each official language.” Her retort is, “Even
linguistically challenged individuals such as myself, who can carry on
very simple conversations on severely circumscribed subject matter
(children, dogs, poutine) can answer ‘yes.’”