OTTAWA—A re-elected Conservative government would have to slash social and economic programs and federal government services to meet Stephen Harper’s deficit-reduction targets, analysts say.

Early in the campaign, Harper rewrote the fiscal estimates in the March 22 budget, saying a Tory government would conduct a review to find “efficiency” savings rising to $4 billion annually by 2014. In all, the review would locate $11 billion in savings and allow a Conservative government to eliminate the $40 billion budget deficit a year earlier than planned, Harper said.

While declining to say where the axe would fall, he said curbing Ottawa’s deficit spending could be accomplished with a minimum of pain for Canadians.

“Anybody who says you can’t find money in Ottawa without cutting vital services to people simply is living in a fantasy world,” Harper said.

But analysts say past experience has shown that the Conservatives’ cost-cutting claims are unrealistic and the savings envisioned by Harper would require significant cuts to programs intended to help the public.

“If it is easy now to find $4 billion in annual savings through ‘efficiencies,’ then why didn’t the government start five years ago?” asked Peter Devries, a former senior finance department official, in a recent article entitled “If Pigs Can Fly.”

He added: “Anyone who has actually been involved in controlling and cutting program expenditures will tell you that it is not possible to find savings of that amount through efficiencies. To find credible savings that would generate $4 billion in ongoing savings would require elimination or cuts to existing programs.”

Canadian Labour Congress chief economist Andrew Jackson said the Conservative spending exercise would likely cause cuts in programs because the obvious, easy cuts have already been made by the Harper government.

He said the spending to be reviewed by the Conservatives — $80 billion in annual operational costs — has already been subjected to a round of savings reviews. “It’s a second kick at the can,” he said. “Those budgets have pretty well already been cut.”

In explaining how Ottawa can reduce costs, Harper has mentioned the example of potential savings through a more efficient computer system. But Jackson said it’s widely accepted that upgrading outdated federal government technology can’t be done without hefty initial spending on new equipment — hardly a cost-saving measure.

Successive federal governments have vowed for decades to hack away at federal spending, but, with the exception of the Liberals under then-finance minister Paul Martin in the mid-1990s, the effort has usually produced more talk of restraint than actual restraint.

The Conservatives’ recently announced 2011 strategic and operating review is the latest in an array of cost-cutting initiatives by Harper cabinet ministers. In all, four previous spending restraint exercises have netted $2.8 billion in ongoing savings in Ottawa’s operational costs. That’s on a federal spending envelope totalling $278 billion this year.

BMO Capital Markets deputy chief economist Doug Porter said the Conservative plan would mean a reduction in federal spending of a bit more than one per cent. He said it’s “not impossible” but would be “a very real challenge.”

Even leaving aside the extra cash doled out by the Harper government to combat the recession, total spending under the Conservatives has expanded at a rapid pace in the past five years.

“Government spending has been growing in the neighbourhood of five to six per cent,” so cutting real spending “would apply a pretty marked slowdown” in government stimulus, Porter said.

Canadian Taxpayers Federation director Derek Fildebrandt said Harper’s restraint plan doesn’t mean much without specifics on planned cuts.

“It can certainly be done but we’d like to see the details of how the Conservatives plan to do that,” said Fildebrandt, whose organization says the Harper government has engaged in the largest spending spree since the Trudeau years.

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“There’s lots of fat in government and there’s always going to be fat, and the government is going to have trim some meat if its going to get spending under control,” Fildebrandt added. And “meat,” he said, means government programs.

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