Jim Flaherty tried to cloak himself in the garb of the amiable executioner Monday.
His message: just hold still, this won’t hurt a bit.
But for those crammed into the stifling Centre Block room listening to the finance minister, there was an urge to duck, because the guy swinging the axe gave no clue where the blade was finally going to come down.
There was no denying the certainty in the finance minister’s conviction that a 5 per cent savings in government spending - $4 billion out of an $80 billion operations budget — will be easily reached so he can balance the books by 2014-15.
But in giving no hint of what programs will be cut, Flaherty started a national guessing game and put the usual suspects on high alert.
There was none of the consensus-building or commitment to transparency one might look for before embarking on the largest cut to government spending in 15 years.
Flaherty will not cut transfers to provinces. He will maintain the pace of spending on health care. He will not raise taxes. He even found $2.2 billion to compensate Quebec for harmonizing its provincial sales tax with the GST.
The government will spend money on law-and-order measures and can’t get a proper handle on the cost of its F-35 fighter jets.
It raises a fundamental question of whether a government that has shown it knows how to spend can now show it knows how to cut.
“In the private sector, this would be viewed as not very ambitious, but in the public sector, I realize that we have not had a concentrated effort on public sector productivity,” Flaherty said.
But he had barely cleared his voice in the Commons before the Public Service Alliance of Canada jumped in, accusing Flaherty of attempting to cut the deficit on the backs of “hardworking Canadians.”
Of course, the real dirty work falls on Treasury Board President Tony Clement. It will be up to him to deal with questions about cuts to programs dealing with the environment or water quality or services to seniors or help for the unemployed — all of which would have Opposition Leader Jack Layton spoiling for a fight.
Flaherty correctly reminded reporters no program is too small in this city to have a champion, but the Harper government will be in the business of convincing Canadian voters why a specific program had to be killed, not convincing the protector of the program.
Every program will be analyzed, Flaherty said, with an eye to three questions: why was it created, is it necessary, and is it fulfilling its goal?
This painful path has been travelled before, and much more aggressively. In fact, Flaherty is reported to have gone back to study just how Jean Chrétien and his finance minister of the day, Paul Martin, did this in the 1990s.
Martin inherited a $42 billion deficit in 1993 and balanced the books by 1998, famously pledging he would slay the deficit dragon “come hell or high water,” a slightly more memorable vow than Flaherty’s vow that his cuts are “doable.”
Martin set the stage for a tough process by building a consensus across the country that harsh medicine was needed to keep Canada from sliding into the ranks of a banana republic. But he undertook a program review and made targeted cuts to departments.
The Liberals hit health spending, post-secondary education, social housing — everything, in fact, except spending on natives.
Martin eliminated 55,000 jobs in the public sector to reach his goal.
“You don’t do these things willy-nilly and with a sharp knife slashing like the Liberals have done,’’ Flaherty said Monday.
This was a budget — technically a budget update — unlike any ever delivered in Ottawa.
Flaherty wore the same pair of shoes he did in March. The only extravagance during the lockup for journalists was water.
The government even helpfully highlighted its minor revisions or “tweaks” from the original in blue type. The same type of transparency will now be needed as billions in savings are sought.
Tim Harper is a national affairs writer for The Toronto Star.