The Finance Minister calls it “moderate” and “modest,” but it appears the Harper majority government’s budget this afternoon is going to contain between $4-billion and $7-billion worth of cutbacks, focused on trimming the ranks of bureaucrats and the public sector.

It’ll be a balance of austerity measures, including cuts to environmental monitoring, changes to old age security benefits and possibly less funding for the CBC; at the same time though, there will be measures to boost job creation through the streamlining of the approval process for projects in the resource sector.

Meantime, MP’s will also be forced to deal with some cuts of their own as they’ve decided to slash nearly seven per cent of the House of Commons budget.

The board of internal economy is made up of MP’s from all parties, and its financing is separate from the Federal Government.

As a result, there will be job losses in the administration on parliament hill and members of parliament will see their office allowances shrink by $2,000 a year for the next three years.

Most of the spending reductions will be phased in gradually and won’t be fully implemented until the 2014-2015 budget year, which is ironically will be an election year. The government also expects to balance the books by that time as well.