“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” — Proverbs 29:18

You can take the measure of a government — or for that matter, any enterprise — by its priorities. And by those challenges and opportunities it neglects.

The Harper government’s latest budget has nothing substantial to say about a Canadian export export prowess that is perilously eroding. There’s nothing new and significant here about building a technology-based New Economy to replace our dwindling base of traditional manufacturing jobs.

The latest budget has little to say about on the 4.3 million Canadians living below the poverty line and 1.3 million of us out of work, and on the causes of the poverty crisis, among them lack of affordable housing and daycare.

Nowhere in this budget is there an exhortation to the oilpatch to ramp up its R&D to make Athabasca environmentally viable. One of Alberta’s economic mainstays thus remains in jeopardy, as the world will someday cease to support it. Already this reality is manifesting itself in U.S. political delay of approval for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, a delay that is likely to extend into next year if it’s approved at all.

There is no relief for Ontarians, whose government claims that Harper has short-changed us by $641 million in transfer payments. That’s the money that pays for our health care and education, the twin pillars of long-term prosperity.

If you’re alarmed about continued health care wait times and Canada’s recent drop from 6th to 13th among the world’s best-educated workforces, there’s no comfort in this budget that these failings are being addressed.

Harper’s recent ballyhooed proposal of about $2 billion for upgrading aboriginal-community schooling, long an international disgrace, is window dressing. The money rolls out over three years. It doesn’t even commence until two years from now. And the funds are actually a reallocation of long-delayed earlier commitments.

Why even hint at dealing with a crisis for which a meaningful solution is long overdue? One of Harper’s first acts as PM was to kill the $5 billion “Kelowna Accord” by which Paul Martin’s government sought to cover a wide range of native issues, from endemic poverty to double-digit suicide rates.

The answer is that this budget, with its happy talk about a smidgeon of consumer protection, a touch of job retraining, a tad of infrastructure spending, is meant to apply a patina of compassion and common sense to the Tories’ singular obsession with balancing the books by next year.

The Tories continue to pursue that one goal at the expense of big yet solvable problems.

To the extent that we do have a debt problem, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) accurately notes, it is with record-sized household debt. That is a consequence of continued high unemployment and the fact that, adjusting for inflation, Canada’s middle class has not had a pay raise for 30 years.

By contrast, our public finances are the envy of the world. Corporate Canada also has a clean balance sheet, undercutting justification for the additional corporate welfare in this budget.

The CCPA is not alone in its view that Canada should be “much more concerned with slow growth, a weak labour market, and income inequality than the federal government’s historically low (and falling) debt levels.”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in its latest report on Canada, says the same thing: Canada’s GDP growth is disturbingly anemic. But its federal finances are in great shape, and Ottawa needn’t hurry to achieve a surplus. Indeed, many economists believe a federal surplus is possible as early as this year, without a resort to false economies.

The facts on the ground thus argue for continued stimulus, and for additional investment in our people.

Yet a misguided sense of personal legacy compels Flaherty to make good on his longstanding vow to balance the books by 2015, come hell or high water.

Failing to do so would be a deep embarrassment for Flaherty. He imagines that achieving a surplus will have him standing tall in the world. There is no near-term prospect of surpluses in the U.S., Britain, Japan and so on.

But sound public finances are a means to a greater end, of building a more caring society. If that kind of genuine nation-building is an objective of Harper’s Tories, it’s one they’ve never convincingly acted on.

It says everything about the small-ball vision of this government that its latest budget vows to crack down on dubious charities. That’s a crowd-pleaser for Harper’s conservative base, but of no consequence to Canadians struggling to make ends meet.

Harper’s agenda has won sufficient electoral support to enable him to form successive governments, though a majority of Canadians have yet to endorse it in any election. Since this government came to power eight years ago our social progress has been stalled. And so it will remain, as this latest, unimaginative budget makes clear.

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