Cheques and balances, the inherent problem with an election budget

Finance ministers nearly always save a surprise for budget day, what media folks unfailingly refer to as a "goodie," intended to give Canadians something to remember from a document that's otherwise dedicated to producing a whole lot of numbers.

Joe Oliver will be no exception on Tuesday when he tables his first budget,the Conservatives' last, before the scheduled fall election.

As usual it will be called Canada's Economic Action Plan. A better title might be Cheques and Balances.

The government has already announced its modified version of income-splitting for families with children 17 and under. And the first cheques will be mailed out this summer under a richer, expanded Universal Child Care Benefit.

Total cost to the treasury? About $4.5 billion a year.

Oliver has also promised, repeatedly, that this budget will be balanced.

Plus he is bringing in legislation to require future budgets to be balanced except in exceptional circumstances, such as the kind of global recession that prevented the Conservativesfrom balancing the books for the past seven years.

You would think that doesn't leave much room for more goodies.

But this is an election year, when moral and political imperatives collide.

• Bank of Canada leaves rate unchanged after economic 'wobble' to start 2015
• Mulcair's'Dutch disease' prognosis was poor politics, but sound economics

Budget 2015 will be the foundation for whatever campaign platform Stephen Harper puts before voters to convince them that four more years of Conservative rule is in both their best interests.

Government insiders suggest the budget could include money to address climate change issues, to encourage companies in the non-energy sector to hire new employees, or to address barriers to First Nations development.

"It doesn't have to be big numbers," says Jennifer Robson, a former Liberal political staffer who's now a professor of political management at Carleton University.

"But it has to be strategic and surgical because they don't have a lot of fiscal room to play with in an election year. And they have to get it right."

Tuesday's focus

The broad themes of Oliver's budget are already known: jobs and growth, keep taxes low, allow families to keep more of their hard-earned income.

But the focus on Tuesday will be sharper, making sure voters understand the Liberals and New Democrats can't be trusted to manage the economy through what the Conservatives call a fragile economic recovery.

That last bit presents a challenge, especially for a rookie finance minister who is introducing this budget weeks later than usual as his department tried to cope with the impact of plunging oil prices.

Government revenues, of course, are also down as a result of oil's drop. Growth projections had to be scaled back. On Wednesday, the Bank of Canada announced the first three months of the year had produced zero, that's right, zero economic growth.

And that wasn't the only bad news this week.

Canada's manufacturing sales slumped for a second straight month in February, down 1.7 per cent on a month-over-month basis and well below even the pessimistic projections of private sector forecasters who predicted a modest 0.3 per cent gain.

And the price of oil?

Well, it jumped on Wednesday to reach a high for the year of about $55.50 a barrel for light, sweet crude.

That jump may underline Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz's assessment on Wednesday that the positives in the economy will outweigh the negatives in the second half of the year. But it is still roughly $25 a barrel less than the price Oliver's officials had based their initial 2015 calculations on.

That economic uncertainty has finance officials still working on the final draft of some of the government's budget this week.

What to expect

The Conservative message will be that Canadians know best how to spend their money, not government.

So look for more targeted personal and business tax breaks in the budget. Not large but focused on, for example, allowing Canadian companies to compete.

Those are expected to include another extension of the accelerated capital cost allowance, which allows companies to write off investments in new technologies more quickly. There might also be certain income tax cuts aimed at the middle class, to dull recent opposition attacks.

There could also be targeted spending initiatives. Expect money to be earmarked for Canada's national security agencies CSIS and the RCMP to allow them to fulfill the wider anti-terrorism mandate set out in Bill C-51.

Similarly, there is likely to be more money for the Security and Intelligence Review Committee, or SIRC, which has been chronically under-funded over the years.

What isn't known is how much money will be available, and whether the amounts will come close to what these agencies have been seeking in the aftermath of the October attack on Parliament Hill and the killing of two Canadians soldiers.

The government has been busy lining up some extra spending money, with the sale of Ottawa's remaining shares in GM Canada, expected to net roughly $3.2 billion, being a prime example.

And for the opposition parties this budget is also critical heading into an election. Carleton's Jennifer Robson says both the NDP and Liberals need to see the forecasts to ensure their own costing is right.

The NDP, for example, has promised to raise the federal minimum wage, and to bring in a national, $15-a-day child-care program.

The Liberals have promised to reverse the Conservative's income-splitting plan, and to bring in a national framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Both opposition parties insist they won't run a deficit.

In an election year, it's all about cheques and balances.