Fiscal Realities Are Usually Imaginary

Listened to Ontario Minister of Education Lauren Broten this morning.

I cringe whenever I hear a politician say something about "fiscal realities" in the tone of someone bravely facing up to an unpleasant but permanent and immutable Truth. It's rare that this is actually the case. Politicians are the ones who decide what the fiscal reality is, so it's almost always disingenuous of them to whine about it, or ask for a pass because of it, when they themselves decided on it.

In Ontario right now, we are facing a large imbalance in our finances which admittedly cannot continue indefinitely, but which is also not yet a true crisis (no one is threatening to stop lending the province money). The government however has decided to attack the imbalance aggressively, using its legislative muscle to overturn the contractual rights of public sector workers and roll back salaries and other benefits they enjoy, while curtailing their ability to bargain through their unions over the shape those roll-backs might take.

As a piece of public policy I think this is very heavy handed, and continues the bad precedent of using legislatures to force change that could well have been achieved through negotiation. But what I want to say here is that it's not "fiscal realities" that are forcing the government into making "hard decisions" but rather something almost completely the reverse. The government has decided to prioritize maintaining current (or slightly reduced) levels of revenue (taxes + borrowing) ahead of maintaining current (or slightly reduced) levels of public service, particularly in education, for what seem to be the craven and cowardly fear of the way a high budget deficit plays in the press.

In other words, it's the fear of making hard decisions that has forced the government into embracing the canard of fiscal realities; the political equivalent of "the devil made me do it".

The government wants you to think there are no choices in the face of what it calls: reality. What's actually real is its ranking of competing priorities.