Roundup: Honesty in deficits?

Posted on by

Balanced budgets and deficits continued to be a topic of discussion on the campaign yesterday, and it will continue to be so today as Justin Trudeau is set to unveil his infrastructure plan to boost the economy, which seems set to include some deficit financing for another year or two as the economy appears stagnant. Stephen Harper warns the other parties are looking at “permanent deficits,” but it bears reminding that according to the previous Parliamentary Budget Officer, the only way that Harper killed off is own structural deficit was in changing the health transfer escalator, leaving him with only a cyclical deficit (which persists, no matter how much they shuffle money around on paper to cover over it). The NDP continue to insist they won’t run a deficit, but they also seem to dispute that they would need to continue austerity and they would even do things like restore the health transfer escalator, which starts to boggle the mind. The Liberals seem to be looking to score points for honesty in that a) they don’t know the true state of the books, and b) the global economic situation, but one might also add that our debt-to-GDP ratio is in a good place now (as opposed to the eighties and nineties), so small deficits won’t affect our economic health that much. To that end, Mike Moffatt says it’s important to ask parties how they would manage deficits, because they are inevitable in the current economic climate, while Andrew Coyne says that we should be paying attention to the signals being sent by the leaders when it comes to deficits.

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/636646713005076480

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/636647037992337408

https://twitter.com/mikepmoffatt/status/636647310450139136

On the campaign:

  • Stephen Harper promised a pittance for rural broadband.
  • Thomas Mulcair repeated his promise for an innovation tax credit.
  • Justin Trudeau offered a tax credit for teachers buying school supplies out of pocket, which is provincial jurisdiction and formalises a practice that shouldn’t happen.

Good reads:

  • Here’s a look at the new Issues Management guy in the PMO watching the Duffy trial, while Andrew MacDougall shows how it was easy to miss those Wright emails.
  • Joe Oliver was scheduled to speak at a private men’s club in Toronto, but cancelled after criticism. Chrystia Freeland crashed it anyway.
  • Here’s a look at what the leaders’ tours say about their campaigns.
  • It cost us $1.6 million to send $5 million in surplus equipment to the Ukrainian military.
  • The NDP removed their policy manual – the items decided by their grassroots members – from their website saying it’s not a platform. Transparency!
  • Some very smart people lament that defence procurement hasn’t been an issue yet in the election.
  • While the women’s issues debate has been cancelled, most of the leaders will be doing one-on-one interviews that will later be broadcast.
  • Susan Delacourt writes about the loss of the per-vote subsidy.

Odds and ends:

There are questions about some anti-feminist sentiments in the Green Party platform.

An attempted appeal is underway in the contentious Liberal nomination in Ahuntsic–Cartierville.

An alternative media outlet with a dubious record claims that Chrystia Freeland is planning on making an issue of the fact that her NDP opponent doesn’t have children. The quote is disputed, but more to the point, it makes zero sense, and the fact that they interview was not recorded makes it all the more dubious.

One thought on “Roundup: Honesty in deficits?”

  1. It happens I agree with Mike Moffatt regarding the “deficit hysteria” but it should be noted that Moffatt is a member of the Liberal Party of Canada’s “Economic Council of Advisors.” That being the case, it’s not surprising that he should be on the Twitter Machine supporting the Liberal case.

    As for the NDP’s ‘lack of transparency’ in removing its policy manual from its website, it seems to me that removing the document was simply prudent.

    The Green Party of Canada has been in difficulty at least twice during this campaign by virtue of the fact that its “Vision Green” document has been, inaccurately, referred to by many (including Moffatt) as its “platform.”

    Since Vision Green remains a significant presence on the Green Party website and since the Greens have yet to roll out their consolidated platform for the current election, the error Moffatt and others have made is, perhaps, understandable but – to be clear – Vision Green is probably best described as a consolidation of past policy approved by its membership.

    Going into this election, the Greens might have been well advised to take the same action as the NDP did in order to avoid both legitimate confusion and political mischief-making.

Comments are closed.