Irresponsible and ineffective

There's no lack of reason to criticize the Cons' unnecessary budget cuts. But let's take a minute to debunk their current excuse for hacking into important programs without any real regard for the consequences:

The government defended the budget cuts Tuesday in the House, arguing that that they were necessary for the government to run more efficiently.

"We believe as a government we have a very important responsibility to ensure that every taxpayer's dollar is spent effectively, is spent responsibly, and is spent accountably," Treasury Board president John Baird said.

Now, if that were actually the Cons' aim, then it would be difficult to argue with their reasoning. The problem is that if the Cons were really out to make sure that money was spent effectively and responsibly, they'd have followed an entirely different process than the one they actually carried out.

After all, the $1 billion per year number being trumpeted wasn't itself based on a thorough program evaluation. Instead, the Cons decided first on an amount of funding to cut, then decided which programs they'd like to see done away with.

As a result, there's no reason to believe that the cuts occurred anywhere near the point where a dollar spent would produce less than a dollar's worth of positive results. And indeed it's not hard at all to predict what are likely to be far bigger losses in the long run due to the Cons' decision to arbitrarily invest less in Canada.

In contrast, if the Cons really wanted to make sure that government funding was being properly spent, the logical process would have been to actually determine which programs were achieving less than full value, and cut only that precise amount. But one suspects that following such a process, the Cons couldn't have cut into many of the programs which ultimately ended up on the chopping block - and would perhaps have had to take a closer look at some of their own dollars-for-votes programs instead as failing to achieve a reasonable return on investment.

While the Cons may be pretending publicly to have been motivated by efficiency, the reality is that their actions can only be explained by a desire to slash government regardless of the effects. And there's every reason to think that the Cons' arbitary cuts will ultimately prove to be the furthest thing from effective or responsible government.