What Nova Scotia can expect from the federal budget

Tomorrow is federal budget day. It’s Justin Trudeau’s third under his government’s current mandate, and it is expected to focus on the cost of living for Canadians. Lori Turnbull is a political scientist at Dalhousie University. You know, we joke it used to be the budget had lots of surprises on on, on budget day. Not so much anymore of certain in recent years that what are you expecting tomorrow? Well, I as you say we’ll hear a bunch of things that we’ve heard already about housing announcements and I would suspect the the school food program and things like that. I think it’s going to be very much focused on the housing plan as a solution to the affordability crisis. I think we’ll probably hear a little bit about the federal government’s approach to a greener economy. I think we’ll hear their approach to job creation and trying to harness some, some of that, some of the energy around you know, new housing projects, new new environmental plan and I think their new digital strategy as well. We’ll hear a lot about how that will create new jobs and stimulate the economy. So I think it’ll be very much a kind of medium to long term term forward-looking kind of budget, which of course, you know, the the question that will hang in the air is are you give us going to give us enough time to do this? Right. So the Liberals are kind of looking for another term to be able to get done what they want to get done. Yeah, I mean everyone thinks about the next election in that world for sure and the Liberals aren’t doing great in the polls and the economy, you know, it’s not so hot either. How much room or how much maneuverability does the Trudeau government have here when it comes to thinking in those terms on budget day? I mean they they can see the polls the same as we do. They and they have internal polls too. Clearly they’re not doing. They’re not where they want to be at this point. The election, if it goes at the scheduled time, is going to be October of 2025. And so they’ve got runway between now and then to try to build a case in people’s minds that they should be given another term. But at the same time, like as much as people might even like the sound of what they’re talking about when they talk about things like taking this this huge approach to housing and and building up new rental property and you know, the infrastructure around housing and help trying to deal with homelessness and trying to to get, you know, shorter times of for approval so that these housing projects can get up and going in earnest. All of those things are are, you know, potentially what people really want to hear at the same time as they’re hitting those notes on affordability. But it’s possible that people don’t want to hear from them necessarily. They might, you know, because of voter fatigue, because of the sense of frustration with this government that is palpable, rather than that you can see in poll after poll. It could be that they’re putting, they’re putting up these ideas and people are not listening in the same way that the Liberals are hoping. It does seem that they’d be, you know, they’re taking it on the nose with the carbon tax. That continues to give the opposition something to hammer the Liberals with. What, if anything, can the Liberals do in this budget to try to cope with that or are they concerned about that? Sure. I mean I think part of why the Prime Minister did this sort of two week campaign style tour across the country where he was announcing parts of the budget one after one at a time, was to kind of give a bit of a counter narrative to the fact that the carbon tax went up on April 1st in affected provinces. And so he was trying to get people to talk about something other than the carbon tax and to switch, you know, change, change the channel from that. I’m not sure if that was effective. There’s some polls that are suggesting people are the the, the, the numbers for the Liberals aren’t changing even as these announcements go out. And so in terms of like the political calculations, I don’t know if there’s anything that they can do at this point, but they still have this, you know, they’re going to, if they go till October 2025, there’ll be a 10 year government. And so that’s what I think they’re really working against. And the fact that the conservatives in Pierre Polyav have resonated so effectively on things like the affordability crisis, well, I wonder about that because I know there’s another budget before Election Day if it comes in 2025. But how much of this budget is about trying to frame the potential election question around affordability? And, you know, in terms of how much this budget sort of tries to lay out that groundwork for the Liberals in that regard? That’s it. Because I think there’s two pieces to that to that question. Like first is framing it around affordability. But if we had an election now on affordability, that would be bad for the Liberals because they’re not the ones that are resonating the best on that question. That would be the Conservatives. You can see the NDP trying to position themselves as the party on to respond to the affordability crisis. So you can see last week Jagmeet Singh started to back away a bit from the carbon tax and say, oh, you know, we’re looking at other things. That’s him trying to connect on the affordability issue, not so much trying to change where he is on climate policy. But I think for the Liberals, they this budget is about getting an opportunity to talk to people about the affordability crisis. They’ve come, you know, they’ve turned around. They’ve changed their minds or changed their thinking from not too long ago when the Prime Minister said that the federal government wasn’t the one responsible for the, for the housing issue, that that wasn’t federal jurisdiction. Clearly there’s been a lot of rethinking on that. And so here they are. But I think the other piece of that affordability question is also are the Liberals going to be able to situate themselves as a party that people trust on this issue? Because I think you know at this point, Polly, Evan, the Conservatives are the ones that are making that argument the most persuasively to the most people. And so there’s still some room there for the Liberals to to they’d have to make their case sometime between now and the next election. Yeah, you talk about affordability and you mentioned the National School Food Food Program coming, but the province has its own program that it’s planning to launch. And I just wonder where the where the federal Liberals meet there and how much of this is the problem not waiting for the feds to do something or try to take ground away from the feds. I mean how do you see all that going down? I think so for the implementation of a of a school food program that’s not something that the federal government’s going to run, run from Ottawa. That’s the complications of that. The administration of that is just hard to think through that is education is a provincial jurisdiction. I think that’s something that would have to be administered at that more local level. And so I think probably what the feds would want to do is work with provinces who are making up their own programs and they can provide whatever funding they want. They can work with a province on whatever funding will be required. But I suspect that the ideal solution from Ottawa’s perspective is that every province and territory would have a plan like that in place and they can work with them on the funding, perhaps on the criteria. And that would put the provinces and and in a position to be able to come back to the federal government at some point for more months, more funds if that’s deemed required. So I think we’ll probably see a bit more of that. Yeah. It’s all food for thought on a pre budget day. Lori Turnbull, thank you so much. Thank you too.