Response to last week’s column, direct and published was somewhat vehement. Some suggested bias, others suggested pending reward.

None debated fundamentals of the provincial budget or offered a situational alternative.

This week, we were treated to a federal budget. It was a beauty – tons of money for Quebec and a relative pittance for New Brunswick or indeed the other Maritime provinces.

The budget abandons Newfoundland and Nova Scotia agreements with the federal government that exempted offshore oil and gas royalties from the calculation of equalization benefits.

The provinces will receive $39 billion over the next seven years to address the so-called fiscal imbalance. In the first year alone, Quebec will receive an additional $2.9 billion over what it received in 2006-07 in social transfers and equalization payments, allowing Premier Jean Charest to announce an immediate $700 million tax cut.

Umm, I wonder if New Brunswick had received 10% of Quebec’s windfall (New Brunswick’s population is 10% of Quebec’s) whether Victor Boudreau might have been able to offer us a tax cut.

The Globe & Mail makes a wonderful case for Quebec’s endowment. “Quebec spends more per capita than its next-door neighbor.... on social programs. It maintains low daycare rates and provides extraordinarily generous breaks on tuition fees, even though they do nothing to improve access to university. All this leaves Quebec with higher taxes, a relatively underperforming economy and a chronic need for federal funds”.

In other words, they are a model of independence.

The federal budget favours the two central Canadian provinces and Alberta. They have enough seats to give Harper a majority government –damn the Atlantic Canadians and damn the rest of the west. This is a budget with electoral vision, a budget that seeks to purchase the affections of suburban, central Canadian voters with a $2,000 child tax credit (worth about $341) and $8.8 billion for urban transit and water treatment facilities.

The budget offers New Brunswick $26 million in additional equalization over last year, slightly less than the paltry $35 million offered to Aboriginal peoples and about three percent of the amount directed to Quebec. But don’t worry, there’s $3.1 billion for the military and $4.1 billion for foreign aid.

I wonder if New Brunswick’s self-sufficiency program would qualify for foreign aid. Oh, by the way there is $300 million for a cancer immunization program, $64 million for an anti-drug strategy and $612 million for a “patient-wait-time” guarantee trust, umm, a trust-fund to guarantee that hospital wait-times will be shorter. I wonder who will benefit from that one!

Now here’s a kicker! The federal budget promises action to preserve Canada’s natural beauty.

There’s $15 billion for projects that cut air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions but no targets to measure performance. There’s a promise to phase out the capital cost allowance for investment in Alberta’s oil sands by 2015 – in other words –the tar sand operators will be encouraged to pollute for the next eight years with impunity.

There’s $2 billion over seven years (that’s a measly $285 million a year) to support renewable fuel production but no mention of research and development to develop alternative energy technologies. There’s $22 million over two years for a law and order initiative to protect the environment. Oh, and there is a National Water Strategy worth $93 million over two years.

That will be used to improve the “quality of our waters in lakes, rivers and oceans”. Wow, we’re going to clean up our oceans in just two years with $93 million. The best part of the environmental budget is the $324 million dedicated over 10 years to patrol of our waters by the Canadian Coast Guard. I presume they will be searching for illegal emissions of underwater greenhouse gases.

Hidden in the Harper budget is a move to further decentralize power from the federal government to the provinces. Increasing transfers to the provinces (read Ontario and Quebec) further denigrates the balance between the federal and provincial governments.

Tom Axworthy, Chair of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen’s University, opines that the provinces and the federal government have access to the same revenue sources, so not to worry. What he does not say is that most of the smaller provinces do not have access to a resource (tax) pool sufficient enough to fund programs that meet standards affordable in more populous provinces.

The national government of Australia retains 69% of all government revenues as compared to Canada with 44%. In the United States, the figure is 67% while in South Africa, it’s 95%. “Most federations allocate the largest percentage of revenues and expenditures to their national governments because they need the taxing and spending powers to influence the performance of their economies, to harmonize taxes and to redistribute income”.

The Harper budget does the opposite. It encourages tax disparity between the provinces, does nothing to stimulate the economy and distributes money primarily to those whose vote may be for sale.

By increasing transfers to the provinces, the Feds have made it more difficult for future governments to scale back those transfers in order to provide money for federal initiatives.

Automatic escalators have been built in to allow transfers to rise 3% a year starting in 2009/10 thus reducing Ottawa’s room to manoeuvre in the event of a crisis. The Harper government has spent virtually every available dime in their inherited surplus to buy votes.

After setting aside debt repayments of $3 billion for each of the next two years, this budget will reduce the surplus to a picayune $300 million a year, providing for a point zero, zero one percent (.001%) margin of error. That is one percent of one percent.

How would that make you feel in a time of financial crisis?

W.E. (Bill) Belliveau is a Shediac resident and Moncton business consultant. He can be contacted at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com Atlantic Insight is a published Blog inventory of opinion articles published weekly in New Brunswick's print media as written by W.E. (Bill) Belliveau, who is a resident of Shediac, New Brunswick, and small business owner, operating his Moncton-based marketing consultancy, Bell Strategic. He can be reached by e-mail at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com