The road to ruin involves a failure during the past half century, first of all by our Federal Governments, to tax the wealth of the country in order to maintain the spending essential to prosperity and wellbeing. When Provincial Governments ape the tax-cutting mania of the Federal Government, the country is doomed to ruin. That is the reason for the austerity policies currently being implemented across the country.

Canada’s tax system, a hundred years ago, was largely based on customs duties and excise taxes. The fiscal demands of the Great War 1914-18 forced Sir Robert Borden’s Conservative Government to institute income taxes on individuals and corporations. Such taxes were even more important during the Second World War 1939-45, in which the Liberal Government of W. L. Mackenzie King controlled the economy rigorously to avoid inflation like that Canadians experienced between 1916 and 1920.

When Louis St. Laurent’s Liberal Government instituted the Old Age Security universal pension in 1952, they used a manufacturers’ sales tax to finance it. The productive capacity of the country could finance this important addition to the social security of the Canadian people. Social security was advanced further during the Sixties by the Liberal Government of Lester B. Pearson. Some of these programs, such as the Canada Assistance Plan, involved sharing of costs between the Federal and Provincial Governments.

The largest increase in spending resulted from the establishment of Medicare in the late Sixties. The failure of the Liberal Governments of Lester B. Pearson (to 1968) and Pierre E. Trudeau (from 1968 to 1984) to establish the fair taxation recommended by the Carter Commission launched the country on the road to ruin. Fiscal problems became obvious early in the Seventies and doomed the Co-operative Federalism that had developed during the Sixties.

Let us scan the Governments of the past half-century and focus the actions of finance ministers that have brought the country to ruin.

The Pearson Liberal Government 1963-68
Prime Minister Pearson’s rejection of the Carter Commission was manifest in his refusal to have its report published properly and disseminated to Canadians (and the world!). Presumably, his wealthy friends, the funders of the Liberal Party, had indicated their rejection of the Commission’s recommendations. As a result, the “Centennial gift” of Medicare would soon create financial difficulties.

Finance Minister Mitchell Sharp (1965-68)—

• announced on 11 May 1967 that the three-year tax holiday for new mines would continue for at least another seven years
• invited comment on the report of the Carter Commission and received some 900 briefs, more than 100 from the oil industry
• announced in December 1967 that the Government would only “reform” the existing tax system, not accept recommendations from the Carter Commission

The Trudeau Liberal Government 1968-79
Prime Minister Trudeau was not particularly interested in economic matters or tax policy, and he probably did not understand the fateful decision his government would soon make. He left fiscal decisions largely to his Finance Ministers. His first one, Edgar Benson, sought to reduce tax avoidance while serving as Revenue Minister in the Pearson Government. However, the Prime Minister was later pleased to meet a number of times with the businesspeople who formed the Business Council on National Issues in 1976 and who sought to avoid taxes.

Finance Minister Edgar Benson (1968-72)—

• let the officials in the Finance Department set the pace of reform—or lack of it!
• issued a White Paper in November 1969 that adopted some of the Carter recommendations but left enough exemptions for wealthy Canadians to prevent raising enough revenue to reduce taxes for the mass of Canadians; among the discriminatory provisions was full taxation on some capital gains, such as profits made from the sale of shares in small, privately-held companies, but only 50% taxation on gains from the sale of shares in public companies
• let the Finance Committee of the House of Commons and the Senate Banking Committee act as forums for all the opponents of tax reform without ever asking public finance specialists to comment on the Carter recommendations or his White Paper
• extended the depletion allowances in August 1970 that allowed resource companies to dodge their fair share of taxation and allowed shareholders credit for corporate taxes even when the corporations paid no taxes
• presented the legislation in June 1971 that completed the rejection of the Carter recommendations by, among other things, taxing capital gains at only 50%, taxing capital gains on shares of public companies only at the death of the holder (not every five years, as even the White Paper had suggested), allowing companies involved in takeovers of other companies to deduct the cost of borrowing money for this purpose (launching a merger mania), abolishing the estate tax, and establishing 1 January 1972 as valuation day for capital gains taxation (a tax break for wealthy Canadians amounting to an estimated $12 billion of existing value that would never be taxed)

Finance Minister John Turner (1972-75)—

• allowed companies to write off new investments in manufacturing and processing in only two years (far ahead of the usual depreciation) and reduced their corporate tax rate by 9%
• indexed the entire personal income tax system to the cost of living
• allowed “corporate reorganizations” to be used to receive capital gains but defer taxation of them indefinitely
• allowed wealthy people to take their income through personal corporations, which enabled them to avoid income taxes

Finance Minister Donald S. Macdonald (1975-77)—

• enriched the dividend tax credit, reducing the tax from 33% to 25% for taxpayers in the top income bracket
• allowed executives to receive salary in the form of corporate stock (rather than cash) and thus to defer taxation
• similarly, allowed shareholders to receive dividends in the form of stocks
• allowed investors to have their shares treated as capital gains rather than income in every circumstance

The Clark Progressive Conservative Government 1979-80
Prime Minister Clark’s minority Progressive Conservative Government did not last long enough to achieve very much.

Finance Minister John Crosbie (1979-80)—

• released a study of the “Tax Expenditure Account”—the cost of all the tax breaks given Canadians—which amounted to $7 billion for corporations and another $25 billion for individuals in 1977
• proposed an energy tax credit in his 1979 budget (although the government was defeated before the proposal became law)

The Trudeau Liberal Government 1980-84
Prime Minister Trudeau returned to power determined to achieve results that had eluded him in the previous decade. This included the National Energy Program (NEP) and a patriation of the Constitution that was meant to meet Québec’s desires. However, the NEP alienated Albertans and the way in which the patriation was achieved, denying Québec’s determination to control social policy in the province, paved the way for the disastrous defeat of the Liberals in the 1984 election. In tax policy, however, the budget of November 1981 was designed to deal with the tax expenditures revealed by the Clark Government.

Finance Minister Allan MacEachen (1980-82)—

• confronted the fact that wealthy Canadians were taking their salaries in the form of shares (and buying more stock options by means of low-interest loans) while paying hardly any income tax
• released an “Analysis of Federal Tax Expenditures for Individuals” that showed that $47 billion of personal income had not been taxed in 1979 because of tax breaks
• recognized that eliminating all of these tax breaks would make possible a substantial personal income tax reduction for most Canadians
• but was unable to offer general tax reductions because of the revenue needs of the government
• attempted to abolish income Averaging Annuity Contracts
• aroused such a howl from the wealthy people of Canada and their media supporters that many of the tax breaks were allowed to continue—and the top personal income tax rate was dropped from 65% to 50%

Finance Minister Marc Lalonde (1982-84)—

• offered generous tax concessions to business and investors in his first budget in April 1983
• established one of the ultimate boondoggles, the Scientific Research Tax Credit, which cost the federal treasury $1.2 billion during the ten months it was in effect in 1984 and $2.8 billion in all, because grandfathering was allowed by Finance Minister Wilson in the next government

As the Trudeau era drew to a close, his government saw no alternative to compulsion if Medicare were to continue. In its renewals of shared-cost programs during the Seventies, the Federal Government had eventually conceded power to the provinces (especially since Québec asserted its primary authority in social policy). The Established—Programs Financing Act of 1978 left Provincial Governments free to spend Federal grants as they wished. As the actions of some Provincial Governments threatened the basic principles of Medicare, the Trudeau Government re-imposed them on the Provinces through the Canada Health Act in 1984. However, the Trudeau Government did not provide its half of the cost of Medicare, as had been promised in the original legislation sixteen years earlier. The result would be increasing financial difficulties for Provincial Governments!

The Mulroney Progressive Conservative Government 1984-93
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney came to politics from the business world and had a clear understanding of the desires of his erstwhile business associates. Although he denied having done so—and the Finance Department could not find the letter later—he had apparently written Deputy Minister Mickey Cohen in 1982 to seek continuation of the tax break on large retirement allowances for corporate executives. The Mulroney Government also took up the suggestion of a free trade agreement with the United States made in 1985 by the Royal Commission on the Economic Union, chaired by former Liberal Finance Minister Macdonald.

Finance Minister Michael Wilson (1984-91)—

• sought to make the budget deficit a political issue while considering tax breaks for wealthy Canadians
• instituted the lifetime capital gains exemption of $500,000
• proposed reduction of inflation protection for the Old Age Security pension in his May 1985 budget (this was abandoned a few days later because of the public outcry), without improving the Guaranteed Income supplement for the poorest seniors
• continued the 5% surtax on corporations as well as the surtax on high-income Canadians for another year, but did not institute a minimum tax
• increased the manufacturers sales tax and extended it to products such as candy and pet food
• ended the full indexation of the personal income tax instituted in 1973
• ended the federal tax reduction enjoyed by families with incomes under $40,000
• participated in the tax ruling that gave the Reichmanns a $500 million tax break to finance their takeover of Gulf Canada
• used his February 1986 budget to increase the manufacturers sales tax to 12% and put a 3% surtax on all income tax payers
• provided a federal sales tax credit only for families that were far below the poverty line
• removed full-indexation from the Family Allowance and declined to index the Child Tax Credit and Child Tax Exemption
• restored the 33% tax on dividend income that had been cut to 25% in 1977
• ignored the fact that these 1986 tax measures would cost the country 40,000 jobs (as the Bank of Canada had estimated)
• used his June 1987 budget to present Stage I of tax reform by reducing or ending some tax breaks while lowering the combined federal-provincial corporate tax rate from 46 to 38%
• accepted the fact that the corporate share of federal revenue—which had been 26.2% in 1975-76 but had sunk to 20.3% in 1984-85—would only rise from 16.4% in 1986-87 to 17.2% after Stage I took effect
• declined to institute a minimum corporate tax on the 60,000 firms that paid no tax
• joined in supporting the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States in the 1988 general election, even though he knew it would devastate Canadian manufacturing in the short run
• used his first post-election budget in 1989 to institute the Goods and Services Tax (GST), a comprehensive sales tax with regressive impact that was Stage II of his “tax reform” program
• allowed the Governor of the Bank of Canada, John Crow, to pursue an anti-inflationary policy between 1988 and 1991 that drove Canada into a deep recession and added greatly to government indebtedness
• allowed one of his assistant deputy ministers (Kevin Lynch) to attack a 1991 Statistics Canada study by Hideo Mimoto that showed social programs were only a minor cause of the Federal Government’s deficit—the real cause was the recession brought on by the FTA, the GST, and Crow’s anti-inflation obsession
• became Minister of Industry, Science and Technology as well as Minister of International Trade in 1991 and thus was involved in negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

Finance Minister Don Mazankowski (1991-93)—

• offered up some large deficit numbers in his last budget in 1993 but was outraged when the Canadian Bond Rating Service in Montréal downgraded Canada’s bonds (even though Moody’s Investors Service in the US had not taken such action)

The Campbell Progressive Conservative Government (1993)
Prime Minister Kim Campbell and her Finance Minister Gilles Loiselle were not in office long enough to take any action

 

 

 

 

The Chretien Liberal Government (1993-2003)
Prime Minister Jean Chretien succumbed to the deficit mania that had been building in the business press for years and presided over the greatest reduction of government spending since the Second World War. The Federal Government’s role was reduced to the levels of 1951, with dire consequences for economic growth (CIBC-Wood Gundy estimated the cuts during 1994-96 as reducing economic growth by 3.5%–and this on top of the deep recession caused by Wilson and Crow a few years earlier). All of this required the breaking of the promises he had made in the 1993 Federal Election campaign.

Finance Minister Paul Martin (1993-2002)—

• was taken in hand by the Finance Department to accept as fact that Canada had a serious deficit problem and persuaded to ignore the Mimoto study that found the source of federal deficits in monetary and fiscal policy
• declared deficit reduction to be his main objective in his first budget speech in February 1994—with social and cultural programs as the ones to cut
• was pressed by the International Monetary Fund to cut health care and post-secondary education transfers to the provinces as well as Unemployment Insurance benefits and funding for social housing (see the CCPA Monitor, September 2000, p. 3)
• eliminated any new social housing commitments, except on Indian reserves, and ensured that spending on social housing would be reduced by $600 million over the next five years
• allowed interest rate fluctuations resulting from Bank of Canada Governor John Crow’s anti-inflationary policy to become a further pretext for cutting social programs
• allowed himself to be persuaded that tax increases were unpopular—as they were among the wealthy!—even though three-quarters of Canadians believed that wealthy people should pay more in taxes
• cut Unemployment Insurance benefits—in a practice begun by the Mulroney Government—by $2.4 billion (while creating an “Employment Insurance” that failed to cover all of the unemployed)
• announced a fiscal plan in his February 1995 budget to reduce the deficit from an expected $37.9 billion to $32.7 billion in 1995-96 and $24.3 billion in 1996-97—or perhaps even $19 billion—by firing 45,000 public servants, slashing as much as half of spending by some departments, and reducing program spending by $10.4 billion (or 8.8%)
• rolled transfers to the provinces in support of health care, postsecondary education, and social assistance into a Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST), thus ending the Canada Assistance Plan and leaving provinces free to cut social assistance rates (as Mike Harris’s Conservative Government did in Ontario later in 1995)
• saved $700 million by “reforming” the Unemployment Insurance Commission
• “privatized” CN and sold the remaining shares of Petro-Canada
• increased corporate taxes by $1 billion over two years, including $100 million from the banks
• used his March 1996 budget to announce that cuts to the CHST would end in 1998-99 with the expectation that the budget deficit would fall to $24.5 billion in 1996-97 and $17 billion in 1997-98
• announced that the Old Age Security, the Guaranteed Income Supplement, and various other provisions would be rolled into a new tax-free Seniors Benefit (in 2001), which was to help lower-income seniors while reducing benefits for others
• extended a temporary 12% tax on banks for another year
• failed to offer even one new initiative in the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty
• used the February 1997 budget to celebrate progress on deficit reduction despite continuing high unemployment resulting in part from the destruction of more than 200,000 jobs in public administration, health care, and education by his preceding actions
• moved to establish the promised Seniors’ Benefit, which drastically reduced the level at which a “clawback” of benefits would occur and increased the rate from 15% to 20% (plus other features that left seniors less well off than they had been), all of this reducing pension expenditures by $2 billion by 2011
• used his February 1998 budget not to spend half of the predicted surplus on social programs, as they had promised, but to cut program spending from $106 billion in 1997 to $104.5 billion in 1998
• put the entire surplus—perhaps as much as $8 billion—toward debt reduction instead
• was encouraged by the Mintz business tax committee he had appointed to cut the federal general corporate tax rate from 28% to 20%
• learned from the latest census data that most family incomes had declined by 6-8% between 1990 and 1995
• was using surpluses in the UI fund to achieve his budget surpluses, while almost two-thirds of the unemployed did not receive benefits from the fund (compared to 13% in 1989)
• used his October 1998 budget update to “raise” the CHST floor to $12.5 billion for 1997-98 (from $19.3 billion in 1994-95, $18.6 billion in 1995-96, and $14.9 billion in 1996-97)
• used his February 1999 budget to increase transfers to the provinces for health care but also eliminated the 3% income tax surtax on incomes up to $50,000 established in 1985 (at the same time that education funding in Ontario, the best of the provinces, was less than half the per-student rate in New York, the best of the US states)
• ignored evidence that the real unemployment rate could be as high as 17.9%, based on labour force participation of only 59.7% in 1998 (in contrast to 62.4% in 1989) and that three-quarters of those denied benefits were women
• came to a Social Union deal with the provinces that removed Federal influence in social policy (so that a province could discriminate against non-residents, for example, if this could “be demonstrated to be reasonable and consistent with the principles of the Social Union Framework”)
• allowed the Human Resources Development Department to launch a Market Basket Measure of poverty that reduced expectations and did not respond to evidence that Provincial Governments were victimizing the poor most of all after the funding cuts they had experienced
• used his February 2000 budget to celebrate getting Canada’s fiscal house in order and boasted that Canada was spending relatively less on programs than it did in 1949 while cutting personal income taxes by $100 billion over five years—42% of which would go to the top 10% of income earners—and ignoring the fact that one in five Canadian children lived in poverty (there were 463,000 more poor children in 2000 than there had been in 1989)
• saw the deadline for eliminating child poverty (committed to by the House of Commons in 1989) revised from 2000 to 2010
• enhanced the National Child Tax Benefit, even though it offered nothing to the poorest families (those on welfare)
• eventually arrived at a revised CHST agreement with the provinces that offered no response to the report on child care, “You Bet I Care!” prepared by the Centre for Families, Work and Well-Being at the University of Guelph, which had revealed the inadequacies in child care across Canada
• used a pre-election budget in October 2000 to cut federal taxes by $100 billion over five years, thereby weakening the government’s capacity to reduce the debt (his priority) or to repair some of the damage done to Canada’s social programs (Canadians’ priorities)
• cut corporate tax rates to levels below those prevailing in the United States, with a schedule reducing the general corporate rate from 28% to 21%
• having been re-elected in November 2000, increased equalization payments to the provinces and arrived at a social housing agreement with the provinces
• presided over a tax system that enabled the top 1% of taxpayers to increase their share of all income from 9.3% in 1990 to 13.6% in 2000.

By the end of his nine years as Finance Minister, Paul Martin could boast of fiscal decisions that reduced Canada’s social spending to ninth place among the OECD nations—even below the level in the United States—saw food bank use double across the country, and made some women in Canada the “poorest of the poor” (according to the National Council of Welfare). Despite that record, he was selected to co-chair a United Nations Commission on International Development and the Private Sector—as (in Duncan Cameron’s words) “Prime minister-to-be becomes UN’s champion of social justice”!

Finance Minister John Manley (2002-03)—

• presented a 2003 budget that offered billions of dollars in new spending, primarily in health care, child-care, and for First Nations
• introduced new accountability features to limit “waste” in Federal Government spending

THE MARTIN LIBERAL GOVERNMENT 2003-06
Paul Martin, having done terrible damage to Canada’s social safety net as Finance Minister, set out to improve his record as Prime Minister. He had good reason to do so. A Canadian Senate Report on the Federal Role in Health Care had stated that 75% of health was determined by physical, social, and economic environments. A conference on the key social determinants held in Toronto during the fall of 2003 focused the ten determinants of health:  early life, education, employment and working conditions, food security, health services, housing, income and income distribution, social exclusion, the social safety net, and unemployment and job insecurity (set forth in the Toronto Charter for a Healthy Canada). A number of these had been made worse by Paul Martin as Jean Chretien’s Finance Minister!

Finance Minister Ralph Goodale (2003-06)—

• presented two balanced budgets and continued the policy of paying down the federal debt by $3 billion annually (in order to reduce it to 25% of Gross Domestic Product)
• ignored Michael McCracken’s view (as head of the economic forecasting firm Informetrica) that investing this $3 billion in public programs such as health care, child care, and education would create economic benefits, including 80-100 thousand jobs
• included the information with his March 2003 budget that personal income taxes would provide 46% of revenues and corporate taxes only 14%; the GST raised another 15%
• launched the Federal Government’s “productivity agenda”

Even before Paul Martin’s Liberals were defeated in the 2006 election, commentators were noting the cash that corporations were holding because they saw no profitable way of investing it in a stagnant economy. Meanwhile, the C.D. Howe Institute, with Jack Mintz playing the leading role, was trying to end any taxation of investment income.

THE HARPER CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT 2006-
Stephen Harper had served as both a Reform MP and the President of the National Citizens’ Coalition, founded by Colin Brown in 1975 to oppose both fair taxation and Canadian Medicare. He succeeded in bringing the vestiges of the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance (formerly Preston Manning’s Reform Party) together in 2005 as the Conservative Party of Canada. Following the 2006 election, in which his party achieved a plurality of seats, Calgary MP Harper was able to form a minority government and chose Ontario MP Jim Flaherty (formerly a member of the Mike Harris government in Ontario) as his Finance Minister, a position he held until shortly before his untimely death in 2014. Harper’s Conservatives won another minority election in 2008 and were able to achieve a majority on 2 May 2011.

One of the first actions of the Harper Government was to cancel the Kelowna Accord that the First Nations had achieved in 2005, which promised a $5 billion investment in First Nations communities over five years. It also abandoned the promise of the Martin Government to provide $1.2 billion a year in funding for the provinces to create a national childcare system. The Canada Child Tax Benefit of $1,200 a year for every child under six did little to expand the childcare many Canadians wanted.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty (2006-14)—

• used his May 2006 budget for an orgy of tax cuts designed to get rid of the surplus the previous Liberal governments had achieved, including reducing the GST by 2% over two years (reducing Federal revenues by $10-12 billion annually) and making pension income divisible between spouses for tax purposes (which had cost $6.5 billion by 2014)
• established a non-refundable transit pass tax credit that had cost $725 million by 2012 without benefiting the lowest income Canadians, who were more likely to use public transit than those earning between $75,770 and $123,184
• was forced by fiscal concerns to change the rules on income trusts on 31 October 2006 and end their tax advantage over other businesses
• used his 2007 budget “Restoring Fiscal Balance” to recalculate equalization payments to the provinces, giving 46% of the new money to Québec—only to see Premier Jean Charest promise a $700 million income tax cut if he won the provincial election then underway
• also established the Registered Disability Savings Plan
• used this same budget to reduce the GST, cut personal income taxes, and slash the corporate income tax to 15% by 2012
• endorsed the policy of the Bank of Canada in keeping the Canadian dollar in the range of 95-98 cents US (when the OECD standard would suggest it should be about 81 cents), damaging Canada’s export industries
• used his February 2008 “Responsible Leadership” budget to say that the budget surpluses of the preceding years were largely gone
• established Tax-Free Savings Accounts, effective 2 January 2009, that would benefit only wealthier Canadians who could afford to save while this provision would cost $920 million over the next five years
• separated the EI Fund from the Public Accounts starting in 2009 but gave it only $2 billion in a reserve (meaning the loss of most of the $54 billion accumulated surplus resulting from eligibility restrictions made by the Chrétien Government)
• used his November 2008 Economic and Fiscal Statement to recognize the economic uncertainties resulting from financial crimes relating to housing in the United States—and the demands of the Opposition—to launch an economic stimulus package that contradicted years of Conservative propaganda
• purchased $50 billion of bank mortgages on November 13^th to maintain the “financial strength” of Canada’s chartered banks (this was on top of $25 billion granted the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation)
• rejected the complaints of mayors that his Building Canada Fund of $33 billion was not an effective new initiative to meet urban infrastructure needs
• followed the Prime Minister’s order to end the per-vote subsidy of political parties dating back to the 1970s and almost brought about a coalition government of Liberals and New Democrats, supported by the Bloc Quebeçois
• used his January 2009 budget to reduce income taxes by a small amount, offer some incentives for home improvements, and provide some money for major public infrastructure projects; the estimated stimulus was 0.7% of GDP when the OECD was recommending 2%); consequently, he predicted a budget deficit of $33.7 billion in 2009-10 and $29.8 billion in 2010-11
• increased the EI Fund by only $950 million (or 6%) during the worst recession Canada had experienced since the 1930s
• agreed reluctantly at the G-20 summit in London, UK, in April 2009 that tax havens needed to be dealt with (as his 2007 budget stated he would do)
• failed to act on the fact that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation was adding massively to NHA Mortgage-Backed Securities (from $138 billion at 31 December 2007 to $290 billion by 30 June 2009, more than the total in mortgages the CMHC had offered in its preceding 57 years);  meanwhile, the chartered banks were lending practically none of their own money and the average equity in home value was falling from 48% in 2003 to 6% by the middle of 2007
• ignored 1.5 million unemployed Canadians in his 2010 budget, while aiming to return to a balanced budget
• used his 2010 budget to promise another round of corporate tax cuts, which had been cut by 1% on January 1 and were to be cut by a further 3% over the next three years (this was expected to cost $20 billion over five years) while the 2009-10 budget deficit was estimated at $53.8 billion
• continued to resist any further taxation of the banks (such as the G-20 was recommending) and maintained this position at the infamous G-20 Summit in Toronto in June 2010
• ignored the fact that the $745 billion Canadian corporations had been spared since 2000 because of tax reductions had produced practically no real investment
• used his March 2011 budget to offer less than half of what NDP Leader Jack Layton had asked for to support the minority Conservative government, i.e., authorizing only $400 for the EcoEnergy home retrofit program, enriching the Guaranteed Income Supplement by less than Layton sought, and doing nothing to bolster the Canada Pension Plan or to hire more doctors and nurses—and thus brought down the Harper Government
• used the June 2011 budget to move the date of a balanced-budget from 2015-16 to 2014-15 and to launch a strategic review to reduce expenditure by $4 billion (which could be facilitated by not spending money authorized by Parliament, as the veterans would eventually discover)
• cut 776 jobs at Environment Canada, reduced the budget for Fisheries and Oceans Canada by $53 million, and reduced the budget for the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency by at least 43% (and cut one-third of its staff)
• used his March 2012 budget to announce Economic Action Plan 2012, phase out the penny, promise to raise the age of eligibility for Old Age Security from 65 to 67, establish strict surveillance of charitable organizations (especially environmental ones) and abolish the First Nations Statistical Institute
• was presumably “okay” with the revelation in May 2012 in the CCPA Monitor that Canadian banks had received $114 billion in government aid between September 2008 and March 2009—with CIBC receiving one and one-half times what its shares were worth—while the others remained consistently profitable and kept their CEOs among the best compensated in the country
• was pleased to be dismantling the progressive state in Canada (as former senior federal government executive Alex Himelfarb said in the CCPA Monitor of June 2012)
• used his 2012 omnibus budget bill C-38 tabled on April 26 to destroy decades of environmental law, including gutting the Federal Fisheries Act and re-writing the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act
• used his second budget implementation bill in the fall of 2012 to amend the Indian Act, the Fisheries Act, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and the Navigable Waters Protection Act—and thus provoked the Aboriginal movement we know as Idle No More
• used his 2013 budget to introduce a new Building Canada Plan that provided $53 billion in funds for infrastructure projects, including $47 billion in new funding over ten years (but only starting in 2014-15); in the meantime, the Building Infrastructure Fund was cut from $1.25 billion to $210 million and the ill-fated Canada Jobs Grant program attempted to involve the Federal Government with training it had devolved to the provinces in 2007
• tussled with his colleagues about the advisability of expanding income-splitting to include families with children under the age of 18, which would cost the Federal Government another $3 billion dollars annually, with most of the benefit going to the wealthiest people—while inequality and poverty became ever more severe

Finance Minister Joe Oliver (2014-?)—

• used his April 2015 budget