Despite ongoing softness in the oil market and a stagnant economy in most of the country, the federal budget announced last week by Joe Oliver contained a lot of goodies for a targeted group of taxpayers.
He also managed to show a slight surplus by reducing the contingency fund from $3 billion to $1 billion and selling off a bunch of assets, most significantly the country’s shares in General Motors.
The big ticket items in the budget include an increase of the Build Canada Fund to $14 billion over 10 years, the creation of a $1 billion transportation fund and an $11.8 billion increase in military spending.
All of these promises are back-loaded, however, with small increments in 2015-16 and 2016-17 and rising starting in 2017.
Yorkton Mayor Bob Maloney was pessimistic about the city seeing much benefit from the budget.
The biggest thing in terms of federal government programs for municipalities has been the Build Canada Fund, and how slowly the money is rolling out to local government.
“The lack of information leads to a lot of questions,” said Maloney.
As it stands, the announced funding has gone to projects “in larger population areas,” said Maloney, adding the bigger cities are “where there are a lot of voters.”
Maloney said he appreciates larger cities have transportation issues, which seems to be where federal dollars are being allocated. However, he added smaller municipalities face transportation problems too, and have smaller tax bases to raise funds from, so it would be appropriate for some additional federal dollars to flow to smaller centres.
Security also played a role in the spending including: $292.6 million over five years for counter-terrorism measures; $60.4 million to increase security on Parliament Hill; $27 million over five years for security for federal courts, registry offices and the Supreme Court; $12.5 million over five years to double the budget of the Security Intelligence Review Committee; and $360 million for the war in Iraq.
Small businesses fared very well with a two per cent decrease in tax rate to nine per cent starting in 2016.
Families with children and seniors were also big winners in the 2015-16 budget. Announced months ago, the Conservatives made good on their promise to introduce income-splitting, an extremely controversial scheme that the opposition says benefits only the wealthy and will cost the federal government $3 billion a year in lost revenues.
Also long since announced was the increase to the Universal Child Care Benefit to $160 a month for children under six and $60 for children up to 18. Parents can also deduct an additional $1,000 with the Child Care Expense Deduction.
Farmers also got a piece of the pie with an increase in the lifetime capital gains exemption to $1 million from $813,600.
