Anita Anand’s tough task to accomplish little

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Somebody in Ottawa is playing a trick on Anita Anand. The Liberal government is sending her out on a mission to make spending cuts that won’t add up to much but will engender a lot of resistance from her own team. Have they let her in on the joke?

Ms. Anand is the new Treasury Board President, so she is supposed to be charged with controlling expenses.

Already, her move from the Defence portfolio in July has probably trimmed Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government’s future spending. Ms. Anand had promised a defence policy review and signalled it would mean increased military spending, closer to NATO’s guideline of 2 per cent of GDP. Now that she is no longer defence minister, the Liberals will find it easier to backtrack on that and spend money elsewhere. In the political accounting of Ottawa, that just might count as savings.

But now, Ms. Anand is supposed to cut $15-billion from budgets that have actually been set down in ink on paper. Luckily, she can rely on a similar concept to “save”: trimming from plans to spend more in the future.

Ms. Anand has given her cabinet colleagues until Oct. 2 to make proposals to achieve cuts in their departments to come up with the $15.4-billion in reductions over five years outlined in the March budget – which the Liberals tout as a proof of their fiscal responsibility.

To most people, $15-billion sounds like a lot, but the truth is that sum won’t have a discernible impact on the federal government’s bottom line. It’s just over one-half of 1 per cent of the government’s planned $2.6-trillion in total spending over the next five years.

You’d think that trimming that much wouldn’t be hard, especially since government spending ballooned during the pandemic, and is still way higher than prepandemic levels. Even so, the government plans to increase spending each year over the next five years. It shouldn’t be so hard to prune a smidge from the big spending planned for 2026.

But Mr. Trudeau’s government has never had any interest in spending controls. Cabinet ministers and their departments never like to pull sums back. Ottawa’s bureaucrats have a reputation for passive-aggressive resistance to cuts. There’s no sign of real political will inside the government to overcome it.

“It may seem like a fairly trivial, unambitious exercise, but I will give credit to her personally if she pulls it off,” said Queen’s University adjunct professor Don Drummond, a former senior Finance department official who played a key role in the sweeping 1995 review of federal spending.

So Ms. Anand has been given a surreal Ottawa test: She will have to fight the system to have a minor impact her own government doesn’t really care about.

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They should care. It is good management to look for ways to cut costs that are not essential – even for Liberal governments that want to spend the “saved” money on other things. If Ms. Anand succeeds with even a modest attempt at spending control, well, it’s worth kudos.

But Mr. Trudeau’s government has displayed a disinterest in actual controls. A 2022 budget promise to find $3-billion in savings was declared fulfilled in the fall because take-up on COVID-19 benefits was $3.8-billion less than expected – in the year before the promise was made. The new target is a modest effort to cut small sums from future spending in areas that have grown bloated.

The Globe and Mail reported last November that federal outsourcing contracts increased 74 per cent from 2015, when the Liberals took power, to $14.6-billion in 2021-22, in a period when the size of the federal public service also grew by 24 per cent.

Now the government wants to save $7.1-billion over five years by cutting spending for consultants, other professional services and travel by 15 per cent.

Another $7-billion is supposed to come from other expenses – leaving out direct benefits, transfers and defence spending – and $1.3-billion from Crown corporations.

That’s not exactly a deep review of all federal spending. But Mr. Drummond is betting that the letter Ms. Anand sent to fellow ministers asking for voluntary cuts – which he likened to “passing the hat” – won’t get her very far toward the goal.

Real cuts – even modest, too-small-to-move-the-dial cuts – would require some tough jostling with fellow ministers at a risk to her political capital. That’s a tough trick to pull off in a government that doesn’t take these things seriously.