.SusanDelacourt: Chrystia Freeland’s budget attempts to soothe an anxious nation
Federal budgets are not generally prescribed as cures for anxiety, especially in the political hothouse of Parliament Hill, where budget day tends to create more stress than it resolves.
It was all this instability, we’ll remember, that prompted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh to make the deal that was expected to define this budget — the one that ensures Liberals will not be tossed into an election before 2025. “This is therefore the first of four budgets,” Freeland said. “You are not going to see every single thing we have an ambition to do in the first budget. So we are building and this is the first of four chapters. So yes, we will do more things over the next three budgets.”
So the mere idea of charting a path, steadying the ship of state in those choppy waves, is in itself unusual in 2022. Liberals were hinting broadly before this budget that they were getting “back to basics.” By that, they clearly meant: doing what they intended to do before the world started pummelling them with unexpected events.
But the plan for 2022 does set out a path to rein in the astronomical spending seen in Canada during the pandemic. It’s time, Freeland said, to change gears. This 2022 budget looks like the Liberals are betting that the Conservatives are going to go farther to the populist right — and that it’s time for the Trudeau team to get reacquainted with those anxious blue Liberals.
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