Federal Expenditures in Canada: The Millennial Vision and its Tensions

21The measure of rhetorical discordance proposed here is the variance of the “PURC ”-(Per Unit Rhetoric Cost- billions of dollars spent per page allocated in the Minister’s budget speech). The Budget Plan tabled in the House of Commons on February 28, 2000 begins with the assertion that it “sets out the federal government’s plan for Canada in the 21st century. ” To this end, it projects expenditure and revenue to 2003 and establishes a long term rule for the level of federal expenditures. Of course, there may be some level of cynicism that such a long term plan will be the victim of the priorities of the next federal re-election campaign- but this paper takes the budget at its face value. [One reason for doing so is the budget’s early announcement of future tax cuts, and its indexation of the income tax system, which builds in a constraint on future expenditure initiatives.] This paper argues that an enduring long term vision must be both politically and economically sustainable, and the paper’s major theme is a discordance between the level and allocation of rhetorical and financial emphasis that runs through the budget speech. This discordance is produced by, and is evidence of, a gulf between popular preferences and elit