2021 Challenges | Tough options to control the budget are waiting for Ottawa

Catherine Levsk
The Canadian Press

“Once the crisis is over, the time will come to settle the accounts. Stephanie Chaunard, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the Royal Military College in Canada, says the government will have to answer for its actions and answer the size of the deficit.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Christiaan Freeland have repeatedly said they are ready to do whatever it takes to help Canadians, as long as it takes, the end of the epidemic.

Assistance programs were generally well received by the population and continued into the new year. But^{To me} Chaunard believes these cannot be permanent and that the federal government will then have to make choices.

“If he decides to end these programs too soon, he may lose popularity, but if the bill is too high, even on that side, voters will pay him. So it will be difficult choices in one way or another,” the expert analyzes.

“The uniqueness is that we do not have a real federal budget from 2019. In terms of budget control, for me, there is a problem. We will see this challenge during the first budget of this government after the election,” said Professor Eric Montigne of the Department of Political Science at Laval University.

This task will not be easy in the new year for the opposition parties who will have to try to make their mark against the ubiquitous federal government in 2020.

Genevieve Tellier, Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, from the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, believes the challenge is too great for him to define his focus on tax issues. Without alienating voters.

“Conservatives, after all, are unable to say what they did differently and people feel that Conservatives should not be as generous as liberals,” he adds. Om^{To me} Tellier.

Om^{To me} Chaunard, for his part, believes the challenge to the New Democratic Party (NDP) is also great, it must stand in the new year.

“Jagmeet Singh, his days may be numbered, especially if he does not maintain the presence of the New Democrats. Both of them will eat him in the back. The government in place, and the Green Party and its new leader,” she said.

Vaccine campaign

These political reflections are conditional on the success of the vaccination campaign.

“It is safe to say that receiving the first few thousand vaccines was not a disaster.^{To me} Chaunard.

While the province has a responsibility to vaccinate their populations, Mr Montigne predicts that Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government will be more successful in promoting the vaccine in Canada than in its allies.

“I think Canada, like other countries, has a fundamental problem of being able to get out of the crisis. […] For example, if the United States gets us out of the crisis two months ago because of the potential for vaccine production, political pressure will increase significantly, ”he said.

Depending on the success of the vaccine campaign and the outcome of the subsequent crisis, 2021 will also be synonymous with early federal elections. This scenario should be expected if the opposition parties bring down the government or decide that the time is near for Julie Payet to visit.

Om^{To me} Tellier foresaw that the elections would serve the interests of the current government rather than soon.

Political scientists are talking about ‘myopic voters’. That is, we see only the short-term, not the long-term. So what happened a long time ago, we remember less than now. We will be further away from crisis management and we will have less interest in the government that manages the crisis, ”she said.

“If they really want to go to the polls, we will look at it with a budget. There, they will take action on the budget, which will make it more difficult for other parties to agree,” she said.