We On The Right Have Made Philosphical Concessions...How About T$he Left

Politics will hamper our recovery
Mar 19, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (5) James Travers
OTTAWA—First the agony of recession, then the pain of recovery. Day by day the evidence mounts that climbing out of the fiscal depths will be every bit as hard as the fall.
It's not just that unemployment is now expected to average 10 per cent across sophisticated world economies. It's not even that it will take years to recover the lost wealth of Canadian families that in the last quarter alone dropped by a record $252 billion. No, what's really troubling is the debt burden this and other generations will lug far into the future.
Before anyone contemplates a jump from a high ledge, with lots of luck and good management this country will stagger back to boom in better shape than the early '90s when it really was about to go bust. Back then, Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio was a chilling 70 per cent and odious comparisons were being made with Mexico's peso crisis.
More than a wake-up call, International Monetary Fund alarms finally jolted ruling Liberals into doing what they and Tories had been yakking about since the '80s. By 1998, more discipline and better times turned deficits into surpluses. They lasted until last fall's meltdown, rolling debt back to a comfortable 30 per cent.
So even if Prime Minister Stephen Harper is overly optimistic in predicting Canada will lead the way out of recession, the country is more able to cope with the additional $81.5 billion the Toronto-Dominion Bank anticipates deficits will add to the national debt. For those still keeping score, that's an astounding $18 billion more than the federal government forecast just two discouraging months ago. If accurate, debt will rise to $540 billion in 2011.
In itself that's worrying, not cause for panic. What does push that button, though, is a parallel trend. In good and not so good times, tax-and-spend Liberals and tax cut-and-spend Conservatives have been rifling the public purse with greedy vigour. Some of that spending was justified: Liberals restored social services sacrificed to balanced budgets, and Conservatives accelerated military renewal. But it's also true that the soaring, often politically driven largesse didn't do enough to ready Canada for today's and tomorrow's harsh realities.
Deficits give the federal government a second chance to correct that error before the priority of digging out of debt makes big discretionary spending a distant memory. Sadly, conditions for wise investment couldn't be worse. Altruistic pursuit of national interests is jeopardized by October's inconclusive election, the distrust still oozing from December's constitutional crisis and the political positioning consuming all parties.
Minority governments have in the past risen to pressing occasions. But, barring a surprise change of course, this one will miss the opportunity that comes with every crisis. Rather than peer farther ahead than the next election, rather than test the country's strength and will, those who flatter themselves as leaders are content mucking in the political margins while Canada is dragged along by what is self-evidently an economic revolution.
What Canadians need is a transparent, collective and collegial effort to find the most creative responses to the most destructive economic events in 80 years. What they're getting is more of the same: spending wrapped in secrecy, power concentrated in fewer, less accountable hands, and adversarial passion for partisan advantage.
Should this continue – and who will find the political courage to stop it? – Canada's recovery will be every bit as problematic as its current predicament.
James Travers' column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

Only conservatism can lead Canada forward
Stephen Harper
Mar. 17, 2009
What follows is an excerpt from a speech delivered last Thursday by Prime...

Finch quits Liberals, calling partisanship 'inclusive, destructive force' "I have come to the conclusion that partisanship is an inclusive, destructive force," Finch said in the email, "and the party's perception that the average person is too stupid and too undeserving to understand what (the Liberal Party)