CKNW Editorial
for March 29, 2000

The Finance Minister could hardly have been expected to do otherwise – smother us all with BS. That comes easily enough to politicians at the best of times but given the state of our financial affairs Mr Ramsey had no other available options.

The budget on Monday was simply a catalogue of nine years of fiscal mismanagement. The record of the NDP has been appalling - especially when you consider that one of the election promises Mike Harcourt made way backin 1991 was to bring back fiscal responsibility - the Socreds by their own admission had overspent $1 billion in the year leading up to the election -and to give us a balanced budget within the current business cycle. Little did we know that the NDP's version of the business cycle lasts about 14 years - or longer if they don't manage to get it done by 2004 as promised by Mr Ramsey.

But it's not likely to be Mr Ramsey who will bear the brunt of our ire if that last target date is not met. It will be a Campbell government which will have to clean up the mess..

There are some harsh truths here despite what Mr Ramsey says. There has been shameful wastage of money. Were it not for the NDP's commitment that only union workers deserve work, the Island Highway could have been built for far less. And we all know about the fast cat ferries scandal. But the harsher truths are these - if you are not going to put money away for a rainy day, when it does rain you have to adjust. The NDP tell us that they have got into debt because they wouldn't cut back on social spending when times were tough. The problem with that argument is two fold - if they had put money away when times were good they would not have had to borrow what they did ... and having elected not to be frugal they are forced into debt not by circumstances but their own inability to manage. The misfortune they now explain away is of their own making.

We're now hearing about ratio of debt to GDP and where we stand vis-à-vis other provinces. The former is an argument used when you want your banker to give you more money because you've failed to be frugal. To compare us to other provinces is preposterous - with the exception of Ontario and Alberta, all the rest are "have-not" provinces that must rely on equalization payments for much of their income. They borrow because they have no opportunity to be frugal.

This government has been pathetic and there is no defence for it ... and we're fools if we think there is. Take, for example, health care. Mr Ramsey talks about all the hospitals the NDP has built with the money the province has borrowed. Where are these hospitals? The fact is that we have a surplus of acute care beds except for one thing - we continue to fill them with extended care patients because we have not built long term care facilities and because we haven't provided sufficient home care back-up.

There is a direct line between what I just said and ½ a billion dollars, and climbing, spent on those utterly useless monuments to Glen Clark's stupidity, the fast cat ferries. Governments would throw sand in your eyes and pretend that these funds all come from different allocations, blah, blah, blah. That is barnyard droppings - the money all comes from one source, taxes, often including fees and other things that amount to taxes, and the duty of the government is to set priorities. If this government's priority had been health care, which it never has been, they could have solved the long term care facility shortage long ago. They had the will to bribe us with glitzy ferries but no commitment to make their stated social priorities match their rhetoric.

There is yet another danger in all this – that because we’re now so used to immense figures that we can shrug off another billion next year on the basis that it’s no worse than expected. The only place the government is being truthful is when they challenge Gordon Campbell to do better but that's like burning your house down then challenging other members of the family to find a better shelter than the chestnut tree you've left them. Mr Campbell would do well to be very cautious in the promises he makes for, barring a sensational change in the business climate, he’ll have no room to maneuver. Successive NDP governments have made sure of that.

No ... make no mistake about it. Monday's budget was a confession of abject failure and those who tend to forget this with time will have only themselves to blame if they give this fiscally challenged bunch any more opportunities to screw things up.