CENTRAL to the sovereignty of parliament is that it, not the executive, should ultimately control the public purse. Jim Flaherty, Canada’s finance minister, appeared to adhere to this principle when he presented a budget on February 11th which showed that the deficit, which reached a whopping C$55.6 billion ($48.6 billion) in 2009, will be eliminated next year and transformed into a surplus of C$6.4 billion during the 2015-16 fiscal year, just in time for an election.The leaders of the opposition parties did their bit by criticising the budget. So will Canadian MPs in the coming weeks as they debate and vote on budget-implementation bills and spending estimates.So much for appearances. Like many finance ministers in parliamentary democracies, Mr Flaherty knows the Conservative majority in the House of Commons will approve his revenue and spending plans even if they don’t understand them. But Canada’s budget process is designed to hamper rigorous scrutiny. Before he stepped down last year as the country’s first parliamentary-budget officer, Kevin Page said most MPs and civil servants would agree that “the system is broken”.The opposition parties blame the ruling Conservatives for the mess, but things started to go awry when the Liberals were in power. Unlike the Australian government, which presents its budget and its spending estimates on the same day, the government in...
via The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1iSk93O
No comments:
Post a Comment