MONTREAL

Misleadingly billed as “an intimate experience” involving Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, the presentation of his fall fiscal update at a sold-out Edmonton business luncheon on Tuesday should still briefly distract the opposition parties from Stephen Harper’s questionable management of the Senate.

It could shape their election platforms and, possibly, alter their campaign game plans.

Flaherty’s update could be little more than the latest Conservative diversion from the upper house fiasco. The government has become increasingly desperate to bring the national conversation back to safer grounds; it tends to consider itself bulletproof on the topic of the economy.

It is a source of considerable Conservative chagrin that the issue has fallen off the radar since the scandal broke last May.

But the update could also herald an acceleration in the government’s pre-election fiscal tempo designed to give the Conservatives an extra edge in the 2015 campaign.

What is certain is that unless the government’s pre-update spin is as messed up as the party’s Senate scandal narrative, Flaherty can be expected to double down on his long-standing promise to bring in a deficit-free budget in 2015.

“The plan is to budget a surplus in 2015 and not a tiny surplus” Flaherty said after meeting with private sector economists late last month. On deck to do the media rounds in the lead-up to Tuesday’s update, treasury board president Tony Clement reinforced the message this weekend. He told CTV’s Question Period that the “goal now is to have a comfortable surplus for 2015.”

It is possible — as the NDP has suggested — that the government’s rosy fiscal forecasting involves a large dose of opportunistic bluster. Or that it is looking to stiffen its own spine as it embarks on a new round of spending cuts. One way or another there is enough uncertainty on the economic horizon to potentially play havoc with the best-laid economic plans between now and 2015.

Given that, one can question whether Flaherty would venture as far out on the surplus limb if his government was not at such a loss to play up what it perceives as its best selling points. As an aside, the word “surplus” was absent from Harper’s otherwise comprehensive keynote speech to his party’s convention earlier this month.

The first consequence of upping the ante from a commitment to eliminating the deficit in 2015 to the promise of a string of “comfortable” surpluses is to raise expectations to a new level.

For Flaherty’s confident assurance of soon-to-come significant surpluses makes the delivery of the tax breaks the Conservatives promised in the last election a virtual certainty.

That starts with income-splitting for couples (with children) that earn up to $50,000 a year. That big-ticket item is estimated to cost the federal treasury almost $3 billion a year. It was always expected to be front and centre in the 2015 Conservative re-election bid.

At first glance, Flaherty’s advance notice of healthy surpluses would seem to amount to a planning opportunity for the opposition parties as they draft their 2015 platforms.

In theory the more surpluses in the forecast window, the more room for the Liberals and the NDP to come up with populist commitments of their own to match the government’s tax breaks and the smaller the odds that Conservative assertions that the other parties are out to increase taxes will stick.

But there is an alternative scenario — albeit hypothetical at this juncture — and it is that Flaherty’s bullish outlook is the prelude to a move to pull the fiscal rug from under the opposition by advancing the actual delivery of the tax breaks.

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The net impact of that would be to pre-emptively empty the federal cupboard before the NDP and the Liberals have had an opportunity to use an election campaign to tell Canadians what they would do with Flaherty’s emerging surpluses.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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