Finance Minister Bill Morneau delivered a federal budget Wednesday he said aims to get Canadians ready for a changing world and potentially shield the Liberals from the forces that brought U.S. President Donald Trump to power.
"Everyday folks who work hard to provide for their families are worried about the future," Morneau said in his speech to the House of Commons as he tabled the 2017 federal budget, the second since the Liberals formed a majority government in 2015.
"They're worried that rapid technological change, the seemingly never-ending need for new skills and growing demands on our time will mean that their kids won't have the same opportunities that they had. And who can blame them?"
The budget, which projects a deficit of $28.5 billion this coming fiscal year, includes a contingency reserve and about $5.2 billion for skills development. That's part of the Liberal plan to help Canadians adapt their education and employment training to a diversifying economy at a time when the lower price of oil has meant the natural resource sector can no longer be counted on to provide jobs — or sustain federal revenues.
Measures include letting out-of-work Canadians go back to school or receive new job training without having to give up their employment insurance benefits, a pilot project to test ways to make it easier for adults who have already been in the workforce to access student loans and grants and doing more to promote careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to young people.
Closer to home, the two MPs representing the Sudbury area highlighted the increase of $25 million to FedNor's $41 million budget over the next five years.
“We're very excited about that news,” said Nickel Belt MP Marc Serré on Wednesday. “The seven Northern Ontario MPs, at their weekly caucus meeting, have had that as their top priority, to increase the funding. And the minister of finance came through.”
Sudbury MP Paul Lefebvre said the move restores funding cuts made under the previous government over the last decade.
“This is really great news – almost a 40 per cent increase to FedNor's budget,” Lefebvre said. “We're going from $41 million to $66 million over the next five years.”
There's more to come, he said, with a plan specifically designed to boost growth in the North still in the pipeline.
“We're going to be announcing shortly a new strategic growth plan for Northern Ontario through FedNor,” Lefebvre said. “We are finalizing that and it will be released in a few months.
“No, you'll have to wait for that,” he laughed, when asked for a sneak peak of the plan.
Serré said the city and the region will benefit from a $100 million fund to promote clusters.
“As you know, Sudbury is the most comprehensive mining cluster in the world,” he said. “And we'll be able to access some of this funding to help build and export more of the equipment and products, the expertise that we've learned in Northern Ontario and Greater Sudbury to Mexico and Africa and all over the world.”
Lefebvre pointed to a change in policy in the budget that will have the feds willing to fund cultural and recreational infrastructure.
“There's also $1.8 billion for cultural and recreational facilities and infrastructure over the next 10 years,” he said. “That's not something the federal government would do before.”
Does that mean there could be money for a new arena in Sudbury, or art gallery, library and the other big projects city council is working on?
“I can't make an announcement on that,” Lefebvre said. “The details will be coming shortly as to what qualifies and what doesn't.
“Certainly in Northern Ontario, there's a lot of cultural and recreational infrastructure needs, and I'll be looking very intently on how Sudbury, my riding, and
Northern Ontario for that matter can qualify for this funding.”
Critics have taken Morneau to task for announcing such a large operating deficit projected next year, and for not giving a timetable yet on when the government will balance the books.
Serré the government is focused on investments targeted to promoting job growth as a way of raising revenues and improving the health of the economy in the long haul.
“We're at a crucial stage,” he said. “The economy is shifting, so we have to look at investments so we can have growth. We've had 10 years of very low growth in Canada. Yet we still (accumulated) over $100 billion in debt.
“It's a very ambitious plan, but what we're doing is investing in jobs for today, and for tomorrow. We're positioning ourselves for the new economy, so we can compete worldwide and have good-paying jobs … The will future will determine if we're right. But I believe this is the right thing to do.”
“A major focus was on trying to help the middle class, and those trying to join I – that's something we're really focused on,” Lefebvre said. “The jobless rate has dropped since we came to power from 7.2 per cent to 6.6 per cent. That's 220,000 jobs that have been created.”
Five things to know about the Liberal government's 2017-18 budget:
- There's no plan to balance it. The Liberal government continues to push for increased spending — though not a lot of it in this document — as the main driver for economic growth in Canada and as such, they don't have a plan for when they'll wrestle down the deficit.
- That deficit is shrinking, though. It stands now at $23 billion, down from $25.1 billion in the last fiscal update, and while it's projected to reach $25.5 billion for 2017-18 — not including a $3 billion contingency fund — it declines to $15.8 billion in 2021-22.
- The cupboard is bare, for now. The budget's light on spending and long on vision — most of the new money it proposes doesn't kick in until the next fiscal year, co-incidentally the same one that will precede the next federal election.
- Donald who? While the budget makes mention of the fact Canada's economy could be sideswiped by which direction the U.S. goes, there are no measures explicitly in the budget to respond to some of the signs U.S. president Donald Trump has already been giving on where he will go, like dramatically lowered taxes and promoting Buy American policies.
- It looks at old programs in a new way. For the first time in Canadian history, the budget document also includes a "gender statement" that takes a look at how some of its measures will impact women and girls, described as the first step towards a deeper gender-based analysis in next year's budget.
– files from Canadian Press
