BOTH North Shore MPs hailed the federal budget as one that promotes economic growth and trims government spending Friday.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty tabled a plan Thursday that will reduce the budget by two per cent, or $5.2 billion, and shed 19,200 federal jobs. He vowed to not raise taxes and said the government could balance its books as soon as 2015.
"In order to grow the economy we have to help entrepreneurs and small-and medium-sized businesses," North Vancouver's Andrew Saxton said from Ottawa. "Those are the large job creators in Canada."
Some of the savings will be found by reducing government travel in favour of video-conferencing, releasing large documents in electronic form rather than on paper, and eliminating the penny, each of which costs about one and a half cents to produce. Another prominent move is to gradually delay Old Age Security eligibility to age 67 starting in 2023. Anyone 54 or older will be unaffected.
"When OAS came into effect," Saxton said, "the average life expectancy for a man was 69; today it's 79. For a woman, it was 74 and today it's 83. People are living longer and working longer, which is great news. But at the same time it's putting a significant drain on our OAS system. It's simply not fair to our children and grandchildren to burden them with an unsustainable increase."
Longer careers could mean less opportunity for young people, which the government will address with investments in skills training and "sunrise industries," said Saxton. He also pointed out renewed federal spending in research and development.
Flaherty did not make any changes to provincial transfer payments, so the savings were found by substantial cuts to federal departments, including more than $300 million from the Department of Agriculture, a similar figure from the Department of Health, $191 million from Canadian Heritage - including $115 million from the CBC - and $225 million from the Canada Revenue Agency. The government also plans to lop $1.1 billion from the Department of National Defence.
Despite the military budget cutbacks, the Conservatives will spend money on renewing the Coast Guard fleet and Saxton said North Vancouver shipyards have a strong chance of winning some of that work.
"It's not dramatic in the cuts that some of us had expected," said John Weston, MP for West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country. "It puts the focus firmly on growth, prosperity and Canadian families."
Weston said more than a third of the job losses will be through attrition, but said he didn't know how they will be distributed among federal agencies. The long-term nature of Flaherty's plan, he said, reflected the stability of a majority government that doesn't have its eye on an upcoming election.
One item in the budget with significant implications for British Columbia is a plan to streamline environmental reviews and cap their timeframes at two years. This will apply retroactively to reviews already underway, including the controversial Northern Gateway pipeline. Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently complained that the project's review had been "hijacked" by out-of-province environment activists.
"We need to be more efficient working with our provincial counterparts," Weston said. "We need good, clear environmental standards and we need government to regulate them. What we don't need is unnecessary delays and duplication of effort. The mantra is 'one project, one review.' The most ardent environmental advocates and the most committed industrialists will have to get together to determine ways to extract our natural resources in an environmentally sustainable way."
Weston said a firm deadline will impose "a level of long-overdue accountability" on Environment Canada officials. He dismissed suggestions that the move is intended to limit public input.
"Two years is a generous period of time. Thumbs up or thumbs down, the decision gets made," he said.
The Trudeau-era youth volunteer program Katimavik was a casualty of Flaherty's belt-tightening. The program costs taxpayers roughly $14 million each year, money that Weston said ought to be found elsewhere. "Other programs have been weened off taxpayer support and this one hasn't," he said. "I don't think it's healthy for us to believe that just because a program has been funded in the past that it will always be funded to eternity. The programs that are healthy muster their own support over time."
