Mere seconds after Paul Martin rose in the commons last week to promise a budget before year end, the spending hawks and government interventionists were proclaiming from the rooftops that now was the time to turn on the spending faucet to stimulate the economy.

Among the elites arguing for a return to "Trudeau-esque" spending were some of the nation's editorialists. A Toronto Star editorial opined on Minister Martin's determination not to slip back into deficit. "In taking that rigid fiscal stance," the Star noted, "Martin seems to see no distinction between the ongoing structural deficits that ate away at Ottawa's finances over a 20-year period, and one-time deficits that are valid response to hard times."

This sort of "we'll just go into deficit this one time" thinking for one-time needs, led to a quarter century of one-time needs which resulted in the structural issue of a ballooning national debt. A debt - one should remind our big-spending friends - that still stands at $550 billion, even after $35 billion of commendable debt repayment over the last four years.

Those who advocate deficits seem to suffer from bookkeeping myopia: deficits, to their mind, are merely negative balances on the national income statement. Deficits, no matter how noble the cause, represent an abdication of fiscal leadership and would add to the colossal mortgage that has already been placed over the heads of our children.

Meanwhile, policy wonks on the political left have been quick to seize upon the fallout from September 11th to take shots at small-government, free market advocates. "Government is important at the borders, in providing crisis health services, in defending the population," they shout with glee. Indeed it is.

But what these folks conveniently forget is that their demands for ever expanding social programs, regional development schemes, and boondoggle corporate welfare interventions in every community were met by eviscerating our military, starving police forces and treating the intelligence community like a bill collector, with disdain.

In this post-September 11th world, policy is back en vogue and government again truly does matter. And it matters for the right reasons, not the silly social engineering expansive welfare state schemes that have been shoved down our throats for the last decade. So yes, Minster Martin must meet the challenge of immediate public security concerns with one-time adjustments (on top of those already announced) to budgets of the RCMP, CSIS, CSE and the agencies that deal with bio-terror preparedness. As well, top-ups to the annual budget allocations for each of these agencies must ensue.

But how to finance this effort is the debate du jour in Ottawa. One school of thought, championed by Industry Minister Brian Tobin, says that government must continue as usual and presumably meet the new public security needs from budget surpluses. Tobin, told Sun media that he "actually, personally," finds it "a little surprising that anybody would say that because the country is involved in a response to a threat posed by a gentleman hiding out in a cave in Afghanistan that all other business has to stop."

What Mr. Tobin fails to understand is that this "gentlemen" allegedly engineered the gruesome murder of over 5,000 innocent civilians from 62 countries and has sent the world economy into a tailspin. Thankfully, Mr. Tobin's view has limited currency. Instead, Minister Martin seems poised to reallocate monies from low priority areas (including Tobin's and Jane Stewart's innovation agenda) to the more pressing security concerns. This is the right thing to do. In meeting our national security needs, the principles that have given us our fiscal security - balanced budgets, lower taxes, debt reduction - should not be discarded!