Canada: Conservatives initiate anti-working-class austerity drive

[Hannah Bell]

In the federal budget tabled March 4, Canada’s minority Conservative government proclaimed its commitment to at least five years of spending restraint, freezes, and cuts.

Under conditions where the world economic slump has driven the official unemployment rate to 8.5 percent and placed in peril the pensions of hundreds of thousands of workers and retirees, the Conservatives declared that the elimination of the annual federal budget deficit must be the first objective of government socioeconomic policy.

Yet Finance Minister Jim Flaherty also boasted that Canada’s deficit-to-GDP ratio is markedly better than that of any other G-7 country. And even as the Conservatives decry the size of the deficit, they are proceeding with a further reduction in the corporate tax rate worth an estimated $5 billion annually. Fully a third of this $5 billion will go to boosting the balance sheets of the country’s big banks and oil companies.

Initially, the brunt of the Conservatives’ austerity program will be borne by the more than 300,000 federal government workers.

Although the Conservatives previously agreed to collective agreements with federal workers calling for wage increases this year of on average 1.5 percent, they have refused to raise federal departments’ salary budgets in line with this pay rise. Departments will therefore be compelled to slash their labor costs by cutting positions and/or reducing work hours, resulting in a diminishing of the quality of the services they provide.

In subsequent years, the jobs cuts and erosion of services will rapidly accelerate. The Conservatives have announced a two-year freeze, covering the 2011-12 and 2012-13 fiscal years, in all departmental operating budgets, meaning that they will have to make do with this year’s already depleted allocation till at least 2013-14. The sole exception is the Defence Ministry’s budget...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/cana-m09.shtml

[PDJane]

1. Yep.

And sooner or later, the liberals will be back in power and have to undo all the shit that the reich wing instituted.....or the NDP....

And then, we'll do it all over again.