TORY CUTS ARE A MODEST START

The federal Conservatives are only fiddling around the edges with
their spending cuts this week, but at least they're fiddling with the
right things. Mostly.

Modest praise is really all that's warranted for the joint
announcements by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Treasury Board
President John Baird. The $1 billion in savings they're claiming is
really only $500 million multiplied by two years, and much of the
money wouldn't have been spent anyway. The government doesn't deserve
much credit for choosing not to spend $15 million on legal challenges
in the now-settled softwood-lumber dispute, for instance, and there's
a lot of that sort of "saving" in the spending cuts announced Monday.

In real terms, the Tories' changes are very small -- $500 million is
less than one-quarter of one per cent of government spending -- and
none of the changes is as important as, say, selling the CBC or
buying a nuclear submarine.

Nevertheless, they offer some insight into the way the Conservatives
mean to run the government. It is an improvement on what Canadians
had come to expect from Liberals, who would have seen opportunities
to spend on other things instead. The Tories, at least, are seeing
chances to really save money and are treating them as such, which
can't be easy for a minority government. A more balanced program of
tax cuts and debt repayment would be preferable to applying all the
savings to the debt, as the Conservatives are, but it's hard to argue
against saving ourselves millions in future interest payments.

The Conservatives were elected with the promise that they'd be less
flagrantly political in the way they ran the machinery of government.
Yet killing $4 million for research into the health effects of
marijuana is purely ideological. Tories have long complained that
there isn't enough hard research to justify the use of marijuana for
medicinal reasons; now they've eliminated funding for it. Even if
you're opposed to legalizing marijuana for general use, there's no
reason except ideological prejudice to ignore the possibility that it
might have therapeutic uses as other restricted drugs do.

The other worrying element in the Conservatives' real cuts is their
targeting of institutions that provide independent sources of hard
data on public problems. Saving $4.1 million a year by eliminating
the Law Commission of Canada removes an agency that offers important
and regular advice for modernizing Canada's laws in an increasingly
globalized and cyberized world. The $3 million a year the federal
government has provided the Canadian Policy Research Networks has
been well spent on social-science research whose results have
sometimes told the government things it might rather not hear. The
Tories are eliminating that money. It seems they'd prefer to hear
from bureaucrats whose work they can control, a dangerous habit if
they're hoping to make sound policy decisions.

Their general orientation of treating taxpayers' money as though it
belongs to Canadians, rather than to the government, is sound and
praiseworthy, but voters also deserve a government that challenges
its own assumptions, not one that bulls ahead with whatever its
ministers think is right, evidence be damned. If that's the Tories'
plan, as Mr. Flaherty's and Mr. Baird's decisions suggest, it may
bite them in the end.