"Hi, can we buy your vote?"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You can't really blame them. They're politicians. (That's Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the left and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty on the right -- below.)

So when they table a budget, which they just did, you have every reason to wonder if they're more concerned with the public good or with their own political fortunes. No -- you don't. It's their political fortunes, stupid. Harper's Conservatives have the most seats in the House of Commons, but they're currently governing with minority status. What they want now is to prepare for the next election, one that may soon come, an election that could put them over the top into majority status. They they'll be able to do some serious conservative governing.

The opposition parties, however, are not playing along -- not all of them, at least. The Liberals and the New Democrats oppose the budget, but the separatist Bloc Québécois will support it. It would have taken the opposition of all three parties together to vote down the budget and to force an election. Now the budget will pass.

And yet the Conservatives will still manage to continue to lay the foundation for the next election, whenever it may come. The budget has hardly been welcomed by all, not least the Liberals ("I've never seen a government... do so little with so much," said Liberal leader Stéphane Dion), but its two main beneficiaries are the two constituencies that hold the key to the Conservatives and their desire to form a majority government: Quebec and the middle class. The Conservatives did unusually well in Quebec in the January 2006 election, and they did better than they had done in recent elections in suburban Ontario, but they'll need to do better still in those constituencies if they hope to win a majority -- there just isn't much else for them to win out west or out east.

Politicians try to buy votes all the time. And with this "family-friendly" budget the Conservatives are obviously trying to buy off Quebec and the middle class (whatever the other winners and losers) -- $2.3 billion a year more for Quebec, a $2,000 child-tax credit for families, benefits for seniors, etc. (No such luck if you're single or Aboriginal or a student or from Saskatchewan or poor or a fiscal conservative -- yes, the right-wing Canadian Taxpayer Federation called it a "Liberal spending budget," hardly a compliment.)

Anyway, that's the 2007 Canadian budget. All we need now is the 2007 election. Then we'll see if the Conservatives succeeded in buying enough votes to govern with a majority since 1993. And, if they did, we'll then see what the Conservatives are really all about.