The country is facing many serious challenges, yet the 2010 budget managed to not address any of them.

Since its release last week, the federal budget of 2010 has vanished as though it never happened. Peter Daniel, the dean of Department of Finance communicators, would say “it must be wrapping fish at Lapointe’s" (the famous Ottawa fish market).

In the first three days of this week, the opposition has not asked a single question about the budget. It’s a strange document indeed if neither the government nor the opposition wants you to pay any attention to it.

There is nothing more central to the lives of Canadians than the issues the budget should have addressed. And there could be nothing more peripheral to the lives of Canadians than the budget that was delivered and the “debate” that followed. This is the best example of why federal politics feels irrelevant to so many people right now.

Many Canadians continue to see balanced budgets as the cornerstone of a sound economic policy. They believe that interest rates and taxes will rise unless Canada eliminates deficits. The budget could have been built around a credible plan to bring the books back into balance in a short time frame. Because of the 1995 budget, Canadians know what a credible plan looks like, and this is the opposite.

Alternatively, the budget could have been less worried about the balance sheet and instead addressed the serious economic and social problems emerging in our society. The Great Recession may be over, but it has left behind many Canadians who no longer have any prospect of saving an adequate amount for their retirement, and families for whom the combined pressures of lost income and the cost of raising children or taking care of parents have pushed them into a precarious level of personal debt. This budget said nothing of any meaning to those people.

A third option would have been the productivity budget many policy experts have been urging for years. Canadians looking to the future increasingly see a country in decline over the long run. Most think our economy is fundamentally weaker now than it was prior to the recession. Few believe that the next generation will have a higher standard of living than the one we currently enjoy. Especially in Ontario, it is much easier to see the manufacturing jobs that have disappeared than where the replacement jobs will come from. This manifests itself in personal anxiety – Canadians are more worried about the prospect of falling behind than they are excited about the possibilities of getting ahead. Nothing proposed in this budget will make any meaningful difference to the future economic direction of the country.

The substantive inadequacy of the budget’s response to any of these problems has been well documented by other commentators. Less well documented, but equally true, is the paucity of alternative ideas coming from the opposition.

The previous Liberal government’s primary claim to fame was eliminating a deficit that had been entrenched for decades. Has this allowed the Liberals to bring a substantive alternative to the Conservatives’ illusions of fiscal restraint? The previous Liberal government accomplished what no other G8 country has managed to do when it put the CPP on a sustainable basis. Have the Liberals used this expertise and credibility to play a leading role in the national discussion about the retirement income crisis? Modern Liberalism has been primarily associated with attempts at public policy innovation to assist the building of the middle class, most famously medicare and most recently the child tax benefit. Does the middle class, or those who aspire to it, look to the Liberal party for hope?

What we have instead are the politics of fear and apathy. The Conservatives are afraid to do overtly what they believe in for fear of being defeated, and so they miniaturize politics and try to manoeuvre their way to a majority. The Liberals are afraid to believe anything at all for fear of being punished – first by the Conservatives and second by the electorate. Meanwhile, the political apathy among Canadians grows in step with the trivialization of our politics.

The status quo will not last forever. Politics abhors a vacuum. Canadians are acutely aware of the challenges facing the country and the planet. What they are looking for is leadership and a way forward.