budget conscience

so the harperites delivered their second minority government budget yesterday. aside from the whoosh of pompously hot air blowing through chicago as a result of the conrad black trial, it's about all the news there is in the canadian papers this morning. and i'm finding it troubling.

i'm not troubled by it for the reasons that i expected to be troubled - my left-of-centre leanings are almost never in step with the conservatives, so i'm accustomed to disagreeing with their positions. truth be told, my face adopts an almost expectant sneer whenever stephen harper's name is mentioned, and my hackles seem to have a pavlovian relationship to any reference to conservative policy. but this budget bothers me in another sort of way. it bothers me precisely because there's little in there for me to disagree with.

sure i recognize it's probably gonna be an election year. yes i see the tokenist spending being promised. but tax credits for the purchase of hybrid vehicles? tax penalties for the purchase of gas guzzlers? 300 million for cervical cancer research and vaccine? i'm hard-pressed to argue against this kind of spending.

i know the media optics are key, and i get that you could park a fleet of those gas-guzzling tax-penalized vehicles in the shadow of the environmental pollution caused by industry, which was not targeted by the same gun. and there is still no national daycare program, or coherent transit strategy, or anything to address poverty in first nations communities. indeed, coherent strategy doesn't seem to be a lynchpin of this budget, unless you count "get the votes" as a solid plan (it's for sure a motivation).

but my problem is this: the budget has, at the very least, *something* to it that i consider progressive. flaherty has delivered a set of promises that at least seem to have its heart in the right place. it doesn't go far enough by any measure, and there's obvious room for improvement, but it is a start. and as far as i can tell (and admittedly, that's not much) it does no great harm. what i don't know what to do with is this mistrust i have of the conservative government. as they're in a minority government position, i'm suspicious of their motives. the party has arisen from the ashes of a movement that has shown itself to be rabidly socially right-wing in some instances, and the current prime minister has shown himself to be adept at keeping his members hushed up (for example, since when did stockwell day become the exemplar of the discrete cabinet minister????) so i can't be sure how much of that social conservatism is still seething quietly under that friendly, inclusion-seeking surface.

and here's the nugget - i don't *want* to like them. but i'm opposed, at a very deep level, to disliking on the basis of prejudice rather than on true observation. but on the other hand, is it simply wilful - or worse, complicit and stupid - to take that proverbial gift horse and avoid looking it in the mouth? is there a way to do both?


sinead o'connor - black boys on mopeds