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rfmcdonaldFederal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has gotten himself and his government in trouble.
This news, it should be noted, has helped trigger a series of attacks by the Liberals and the NDP and the Bloc that may yet presage another federal election a year after the last one. Chantal Hébert in the Toronto Star thinks that Harper might no longer be able to pull it off.
Me? I don't care. The Liberals and Conservatives seem relatively similar, though I'd still definitely vote Liberal, and the NDP doesn't have a chance of being anything other than the junior partner in a coalition government. Alas, I can't vote for the Bloc; the Bloc, it seems, actually stands for something, but their candidates don't stand here. Tant pis
Putting the best possible pre-election gloss on forecasts of deeper red ink for Ottawa, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is assuring Canadians the light at the end of the deficit tunnel should be visible by 2015.
Mr. Flaherty refused to promise when the Conservatives might balance the budget – blaming a murky economic outlook – but insisted the Tories are the only party that can be trusted to bring Ottawa back into surplus without raising taxes or cutting transfers to provinces.
The Conservative Finance Minister used an earlier-than-usual economic update released Thursday to stump for an apparently inevitable fall election campaign, warning the Liberals are not up to the task of balancing the books. The update said this year's deficit has soared to nearly $56-billion and predicts shortfalls will be deeper and more persistent than Ottawa had previously acknowledged, adding nearly $70-billion more to Canada's debt.
[. . .]
The Finance Department predicted budget shortfalls would dwindle to a “manageable” deficit of $5.2-billion by 2014-15 – just 0.3 per cent of economic output.
“With overall spending of around $300-billion [at that time], that would be a very modest deficit to deal with,” Mr. Flaherty said.
But then he warned it would nevertheless be a struggle to get this under control. “That is not to say that returning to balance will be easy,” Mr. Flaherty said in a speech to a Victoria, B.C., business crowd.
“It will require leadership and sustained discipline, especially with such a historic degree of uncertainty for the months and years ahead.”
Although Mr. Flaherty had last week said he would lay out a path to balanced budgets – “how we will move back to surplus” – the effort presented Thursday fell well short of this.
This news, it should be noted, has helped trigger a series of attacks by the Liberals and the NDP and the Bloc that may yet presage another federal election a year after the last one. Chantal Hébert in the Toronto Star thinks that Harper might no longer be able to pull it off.
The mathematics of a Conservative campaign based on the spectre of a post-election unholy alliance between separatists, socialists and the federal Liberals does not easily add up to a majority.
There are no guarantees such a campaign would result in a decisive Conservative victory and many reasons to doubt that it would or, at least, not without exacerbating tensions on the unity front.
In the heat of last year's parliamentary crisis, the prospect of a Liberal-NDP coalition designed to govern with the support of the Bloc Québécois briefly propelled the Conservatives into majority territory.
But rekindling those passions in the hope of channelling widespread fatigue with short-lived minority Parliaments into a Conservative majority could be a lose-lose game both for the Prime Minister and the fractious country he seeks to continue to govern.
Me? I don't care. The Liberals and Conservatives seem relatively similar, though I'd still definitely vote Liberal, and the NDP doesn't have a chance of being anything other than the junior partner in a coalition government. Alas, I can't vote for the Bloc; the Bloc, it seems, actually stands for something, but their candidates don't stand here. Tant pis
