Librano Ralphie’s Fiscal Innovation

Well, congratulations to Ralph Goodale. In his few short months as finance minister, the innovation he has brought to the fiscal management of the Canadian treasury signal that, like the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Federal Budget is a “living document”.
After breaking new ground with the introduction of the Buzz Hargrove Paper Napkin Motel Room Amending Process, and giving the green light for nearly 6 billion in seed money for the new Department of Buying Off Ontario*, Ralph Goodale has created, with the approval of his Prime Minister, the “Government Of Canada Perpetual Liberal Re-Election Slush Fund.
Terence Corcoran in the National Post, explains;

Never Before has a Canadian government given itself such freewheeling fiscal elbow room. Certainly Don Drummond, former finance official and now chief economist at TD Financial, has never seen anything like it — a $4.5-billion slush fund that government can dip into at will. “For years government has wanted an instrument that would allow it to allocate spending without having to say what it’s for. This act will do it.”
Readers can check out this blank-cheque spending legislation below. Here’s how it works. Sometime in August, 2007, the federal government will check the final numbers from fiscal year 2005-6. If there’s more than a $2-billion surplus, that extra money above $2-billion can be spent. For example, if the surplus is $5-billion, the first $2-billion will be used to pay down debt, but the remaining $3-billion must be spent on the grab bag of unspecified areas. Same thing the following year.
As Don Drummond put it yesterday, this is the first time Ottawa has been able to “define the money before it defines the program.” The Layton list, sprawling over a dozen broad issues — environment, housing, transit, training programs, foreign aid, energy, education, aboriginal, tuition fees — is an open field. Not only are there no programs, Ottawa doesn’t even have a jurisdictional outlet for tuition fees, for example. (Oddly missing from the list is a $100-million union pension fund bailout, mentioned in earlier news leaks.)
Just to be doubly safe that the government’s ability to spend freely without parliamentary approval will be protected in future, Mr. Goodale threw in a clause giving the Cabinet power to “specify the particular purposes for which payments referred to in subsection (1) may be made and the amounts of those payments for the relevant fiscal year.”
In a brief news release, Mr. Goodale called all this “new investments” that build on the “fiscally responsible manner” Ottawa is spending money. Here’s how it works: Ottawa spends what it gets, when and how it wants, without parliamentary approval.

Librano Ralphie just taken the “lessons learned” through the experience gained in Sponsorship, and applied it to the federal budget. Simple? Simple.
Bruce Gottfred has more.