OTTAWA — The federal budget is where a government explains its most ambitious long-term plans, with high-flown rhetoric and huge dollar figures.
This year, it’s also where we find out about the government’s desire for the country to join an internationally beloved song-writing contest and to conduct space launches on Canadian turf.
The annual budget is always a strange mix of big news and small-but-captivating ideas — never forget the year
former prime minister Stephen Harper abolished the penny
— so we dug into Tuesday’s federal budget and found some of the deepest cuts from the government’s spending plan.
Space launch
Details are slim — literally one sentence in the 400-page budget document — but Canada looks to be joining the space race.
The budget announced funding of $182 million over three years to establish “sovereign space launch capability” in Canada.
Canada wants to join Eurovision
Buried in a section of the budget about arts funding and modernizing the CBC’s mandate is a throwaway line about the government’s plan to work with the CBC to “explore participation in Eurovision.”
Wait, what? The song contest? The
European
song contest?
The Eurovision Song Contest — simply called “Eurovision” by its legion of fans, which apparently includes the authors of the federal budget — is a televised songwriting contest that pits nations against each other.
The participants are chosen by a qualifying broadcaster from each country in Europe, and many other countries that participate in the contest.
Prime Minister Mark Carney never tires of describing Canada as the “most European of non-European nations” and this may be his way of putting his song-writing money where his mouth is.
AI everywhere
Carney talked a big game on artificial intelligence during the April election and, quickly following the vote, he appointed former broadcaster Evan Solomon as his AI minister.
Carney’s focus on AI is now starting to show up inside the government. The budget revealed a plan to “develop a made-in-Canada AI tool that can be deployed across the federal government.” The software will allow the government to keep its data within Canadian borders, while it increasingly worries about “digital sovereignty.”
The government also hopes that AI will help it trim the public service, with plans for “AI chat bots and self-service tools” at Public Services and Procurement Canada. The Privy Council also revealed a plan to start “automating external correspondence” to help meet spending reduction goals.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents public sector workers, was already expressing its displeasure with the plan on Tuesday.
The union touted the results of a poll it conducted that found 56 per cent of Canadians preferred a human case manager to “handle taxes, benefits, and pensions rather than artificial intelligence.”
Better weather forecasting
The government is spending $2.7 billion over nine years to beef up Canada’s weather forecasting capabilities. The money will go to the Meteorological Service of Canada to replace the super-computer it uses to make these complicated forecasts.
Fixing Canada’s alert system
Fixing Canada’s emergency alert system was a key recommendation from the commission called after the Nova Scotia mass murder in 2020. In response, the budget will set aside $55 million for Public Safety Canada over four years to create a new alerting system.
The system is designed to notify Canadians of Amber Alerts, imminent natural disasters, extreme weather events and security threats, such as the “active shooter” situation in Nova Scotia in 2020 that left 22 people dead. The decision by police not to use the current alerting system while the shooter was on the run drew widespread criticism and was one of the reasons the commission was launched.
The commission called for a framework of national standards for provinces to follow in creating alert systems and for a system that doesn’t rely on private phone companies to operate.
Planting trees is harder than it looks
During the 2019 election, former prime minister Justin Trudeau unleashed one of his most famous social media posts.
“We’ll plant 2 billion trees over the next ten years. That’s it. That’s the tweet,” wrote Trudeau, after a meeting with the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.
Since the famous tweet, it hasn’t been going well. Two years later, the government had only planted 8.5 million trees, which was about 0.4 per cent of the total goal,
.
Modest improvements in tree-planting performance soon materialized, but were considered
highly suspect by some commentators
due to complicated accounting tricks.
Now, the plan has been cancelled. Carney’s first budget will end the tree-planting program, saving $200 million over four years.
National Post
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