Big Promises, Small Government
Big Promises, Small Government
Doing Less with Less in the BC Liberal New Era
The BC Liberal Party, under Gordon Campbell, won a massive majority in 2001 on the strength of its New Era electoral platform. On his first day in office, Campbell fulfilled the party’s campaign pledge to dramatically reduce personal income taxes in British Columbia.
Big Promises, Small Government demonstrates the integral relationship between effective tax policy and sustainable social programs. In this important and original case study, George Abbott provides a rigorous analysis of an intense and often controversial period in the province’s political history. Despite sharply declining economic indices, the new premier expected that lower taxes would spur investment and growth, essentially paying for themselves. Instead, the Campbell government’s precipitous and ideological decision to cut taxes and exempt health and education – some 70 percent of the provincial budget – from any decrease in expenditures left smaller ministries scrambling to save $4.4 billion to meet a balanced budget. Severe budget cuts extended throughout social ministries with direct impact on their often vulnerable clients.
Big Promises, Small Government demonstrates the inherent difficulties that tax cuts present to small, open trading economies such as British Columbia’s, which could not hope to reshape its local fortunes quickly amid broader global shifts. George Abbott’s insider perspective and compelling insights on the genesis, implementation, and real-world consequences of a tax policy offer vital lessons to future governments and gripping reading on the effects of short-sighted tax cuts on a province.
This book will be of interest not only to political science scholars and students but also to a wide audience of political journalists, civil servants, policy specialists, public administrators, historians, and politically engaged readers.
Big Promises, Small Government should be of special interest to students of public policy and public administration. But it also deserves a wider readership. Clearly written and displaying the dry wit for which Abbott was renowned during his years in public life, the book provides an insightful account of the first of Gordon Campbell’s three terms of office.
Big Promises, Small Government is an excellent case study in public policy and New Public Management, written not just by a former political practitioner but by someone who was inside the very government that made these decisions.
In a landmark study of the Campbell years, Abbott tells the story of what went wrong, how it went wrong, and where many of the wrong-headed ideas came from in the first place. This book can be read as both an ugly slice of political history and an academic case study in public policy failure. But at the end of it, Abbott also reminds us that there were real victims in all this, and they included some of the most vulnerable citizens in the province.
Big Promises is a well-informed examination of how policy was made in the first term of Gordon Campbell’s government. It offers the useful lesson that successful policies elsewhere should not be adopted in haste as they may not be timely or appropriate for British Columbia’s circumstances.
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