The Liberal government staved off a winter election Nov. 17, after their federal budget passed through the House of Commons.
The budget vote also served as a confidence vote in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government, which narrowly succeeded with 170 MPs for and 168 against the budget.
“Normally in a minority government situation, anytime there’s a confidence vote, you’re not going to go into the vote as the governing party unless you know it’s going to pass,” said Matt Farrell, a politics professor at Fanshawe College, who spoke with XFM News about the federal budget.
“It looks like Prime Minister Carney was almost daring the opposition to vote against it,” Farrell said. “By many counts, it seems like he really didn’t know if it would pass or not.
Four MPs, along with the house speaker, abstained from voting. This included two Conservative party MPs and two NDP MPs.
“The fact that each one managed to orchestrate two abstentions leads me to believe that nobody really knew what was happening here,” said Farrell.
He adds that the budget itself will not have much impact on Canadians in the immediate term.
“A lot of it is sort of longer term, changes to depreciation expenses for businesses, grants for infrastructure, things that have a really long lead time,” Farrell said. “They’ll take years to actually see any movement on.
Farrell said that a lot of the measures in the budget are designed to promote natural resource development and to attract businesses to come to Canada.
“And for the average person, we’re not going to see those,” he said. “Once they do get rolling, ideally there’s a spillover effect into the labor market. And we’ll see Canadians apply for those jobs, see more vacancies.”
“I think that’s the hope,” Farrell said. “But just a strategic choice in opting for longer-term measures that will hopefully grow the economy five years down the road instead of tangible things that voters might recognize and experience today.”
