You can say one thing for the powers that be in the banking industry. They've got a lot of nerve.

This past week, our own finance minister, Jim Flaherty, along with Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, came out strongly in opposition to a modest proposal to regulate the U.S. banking system.

Their interventions followed a concerted effort by American bank lobbyists to spark international opposition to U.S. regulatory reforms.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty missed no photo-op last weekend as he hosted the G7 finance ministers in Iqaluit. Watching Flaherty climb onto dog sleds, crawl into igloos and wolf down seal meat, Canadians got little sense of something else he was up to: obstructing worldwide momentum for a tax on financial speculation.

The idea of curbing financial speculation by imposing a tax on financial transactions has been attracting support from reformers ever since it was proposed in the early 1970s by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin.

The budget we were handed on Tuesday is a scattershot affair, forged by a government desperate to cling to power. It offers no vision of how Canada can find its feet in the 21st-century realities taking shape south of the border and around the world.

The Conservatives reversed everything they've stood for to ensure bulletproof political passage of their plan. Michael Ignatieff has taken coalition government off the table but threatened the Conservatives with further fire with his amendment demanding repeated confidence motions in the House in March, June and December. But that amendment won't pass, since we are back to the usual intra-party head-butting. The NDP calls the amendment a cover for one more Liberal vote of confidence in Harper, and the Bloc says the motion means nothing.

In 1971, Richard Nixon famously declared, "We are all Keynesians now." Yet, even as he spoke those words, the economics profession (led by Milton Friedman) was turning sour on government intervention - celebrating, instead, the self-correcting virtues of the free market.

Suddenly, however, the pendulum's come flying back. It's awfully hard to praise unregulated markets these days. And "stimulus" is the economic flavour of the month. Politicians of all stripes are on the bandwagon - even many who, until six months ago, derided the very concept. Our own Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, is now putting the finishing touches on a budget that, he will claim, does its share of "stimulus."