It is a lonely road. Ontario Treasurer Charles Sousa is busy working on his budget and he is hardly going to listen to some bloody blogger from Babel. His Premier has told him to fix the deficit and that is what he is going to do. It hardly matters that squeezing the economy at this time is stupid. Charles has his marching orders.
Only a few of us said that Don Drummond’s report to Premier McGuinty and his Treasurer Duncan last year was crap. It was a banker’s report that said the province had to stop running deficits. Every banker in Canada is potty trained on that idea. It is like they know that they only lend money to people who do not need it. They are not exactly Keynesian economists. Banking has nothing to do with economics. Some of Canada’s banks issue economic forecasts as the closest they can get to any form of humour. They are usually wrong but it is a tradition, like giving out calendars.
But help is at hand. It is not exactly neutral help but we will take what we can get. The help is from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Sure, the centre is a bit to the political left but it is a hell of a lot more responsible than the right-wing yahoos at the Fraser Institute. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has always done responsible and well-reasoned work.
And the name of the study says it all. More Harm Than Good is the very appropriate title.
And that is what faces us. With Finance Minister Jim Flaherty bringing down his austerity budget this week, with Ontario’s budget to follow, we are faced with the combination destroying our fragile recovery. We are told that Flaherty’s budget will take us back at least a half century to times of high apprenticeship. This seems like a band-aid solution to a haemorrhage but it is a typically Conservative Party answer. The only problem is that if Ontario follows up that conservative budget with another conservative budget, we will end up screwing the economy.
The authors of the report make it very clear that Liberal Party austerity efforts over the past year have done more for Ontario Conservative Leader Tim Hudak than the voters. They point out that Ontario’s misguided and ineffective efforts at austerity could be creating a self-defeating vicious circle.
The one thing that seems to puzzle the authors is how the Ontario government can keep changing the deficit figures. They are probably like the cost of not building gas fired generating plants. The figures just keep changing.
-30-
Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]