Canadians, the Budget, and COVID in Ontario
(The good, the bad and the ugly)
by Maj (ret'd) CORNELIU E. CHISU, CD, PMSC,
FEC, CET, P. Eng.
Former Member of Parliament
Pickering-Scarborough East
As we face more and more limitations on our civil liberties most Canadian politicians from left leaning to right leaning, are more concerned with protecting their privileges than serving the people. Wake up Canada!
The recently presented Federal budget with its undertone of political ambitions, just like the Ontario provincial budget, seems to be bent on drowning the next generations in immense debt.  The political class does not seem to care about the future of Canada. Can we blame them?... they were elected……
Let's start by evaluating the federal budget just submitted. To do this, we need to ask a very simple question: what immediate problems need to be resolved and what is the vision for the future?
This budget, set out in 700+ pages of (red) ink, trumpeting concern for the people, says a lot about government motivations.
As a humble citizen I can only try to answer, what to me, is the most pressing question at this particular moment: where will economic growth come from over the long term once the pandemic is over?
To start, it is clear that the government's decision to spend more than $100 billion in so-called short-term stimulus is a foggy political solution for a fast brewing economic problem.
If you look more closely, you'll find that the budget arithmetic doesn't match the current economic data, but what can you expect from the parliamentary elite.
The budget document is clear on that front: "Private sector economists expect real gross domestic product (GDP) to rebound from a 5.4 per cent contraction in 2020 to a growth of 5.8 per cent in 2021 and 4 per cent in 2022, a faster recovery than the growth rates of, respectively, 4.8?per cent and 3.2 per cent projected in the November 2020 Fall Economic Statement (FES 2020)."
Try to find a clear plan and path to make Canada more productive and competitive in the 739 pages that follow.
Although some of the objectives and proposed measures such as investments in child care, skills, life bio sciences and clean tech, should be applauded, it is hard to find a coherent growth plan for the future.

Real governing is about making choices, but if this budget can be defined as anything, it is everything and nothing. Does it define and focus on sectors of the economy in which Canadians might be competitive on the global stage?  Like nuclear energy for example? In the 270 measures this budget proposes there is not a single reference to anything like that.
Our labour force is aging and our low levels of business investment reflect a lack of large and technologically leading Canadian firms operating in our economy. We need to encourage more innovation to grow more firms.
The government's response in this budget? Essentially, it has not addressed our innovation shortcomings (vaccine manufacturing) and has been silent to date on this front.
The Strategic Innovation Fund, which gets a boost of $7.2 billion over the next seven years, is not the best of what industrial policy has to offer: instead of building sectoral capabilities in investing in applied R&D, which is what global leaders like the Germans, Americans and South Koreans do, it provides subsidies and repayable loans to firms.
Does it drive more business investments and make our firms more competitive on the global stage? In the last three decades, nobody has ever tried to answer this question seriously in Ottawa, whichever government was in power.
What about the need to concentrate on applied research??What about aggressively commercializing our publicly-funded research? What about funding our National Research Council better? As an engineer, I was one of the few politicians in Ottawa who took the trouble to visit their facilities and understand the outstanding work they do. Unfortunately, engineers are an endangered species in the Canadian House of Commons.
Other countries in the western world, and China, act more boldly in their budgets, creating mission-driven institutions that are unconstrained by the pitfalls of an antiquated public service bureaucracy.

What does this budget say about our level of ambition, and our resolve for steadfast execution and implementation? How fast will we move to assert ourselves economically in this new geopolitical environment?
On the same day that Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland tabled the budget, NASA flew a helicopter on Mars and charted an unprecedented new partnership with the private sector on space exploration. Back in Ottawa, our budget allocated $90 million for incubators and accelerators "to give enrolled start-ups access to advice."?
It seems we are often the last to realize that the world is moving faster than we are. Just look at our record on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
While China and the United States are moving fast to build their Electric Vehicles (EV) supply chains, bureaucrats at Natural Resources and the Treasury Board Secretariat will be busy in the coming year working on a new Treasury Board submission to fund a new "Critical Battery Minerals Centre of Excellence."?which, as usual, will be well behind the times.
This budget in essence adds many more layers of duplication and bureaucratic complexity to a system that was never known for its nimbleness and agility. A more focused public-private partnership in key areas to drive growth which would achieve better results is substantially missing in this budget.

After doubling our federal debt in only six years, and spending close to a trillion dollars, not having a concept on long-term development is the worst possible legacy of this budget and really bad for the future of Canada.
Most of the problems with the federal budget are also true of the last Province of Ontario Budget. However, in Ontario we have more serious problems.  Let's take a look at the disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is really ugly.
A complete breakdown of intelligent communications between the Government of Ontario and their advisory body, the Ontario COVID-19 Science Table, has resulted in an unprecedented number of bad decisions made by the Government of Ontario.
The "Table", composed of some 100 doctors, researchers and specialists, is the independent body that furnishes advice to Premier Doug Ford and his cabinet on how best to beat the deadly pandemic. It is their modelling that shows Ontario careening towards 30,000 news cases per day.

How can such an immense body produce valuable real time information? Quantity doesn't mean quality.
Were they as useful as they pretend to be, they would have arrived at better conclusions at the earlier stages of the pandemic. Pointing fingers and blaming only the government is unprofessional. They should take their share of the responsibility, not a Pontius Pilate attitude.

The lack of understanding and lack of communication between these entities has generated actions such as dispatching police officers to police the pandemic in an unprecedented limitations of civil liberties. Though later withdrawn, this measure generated elements of civil disobedience, and compromised the people's trust in the government's ability to deal with the health crisis.

As a result we're in a complete mess, and the headless chicken syndrome has become the new pandemic and order of the day in Ontario.
What do you think?