Alberta has been doing yo-yo budgeting for decades so it comes as little surprise that with bitumen prices in free fall, our provincial budget is in a deficit position.
More surprising is why the Canadian government has just delivered its fifth consecutive deficit budget.
Since taking power, the “fiscally-responsible” Conservative Government has ratcheted up the national debt by an astounding $123.4 billion dollars. This year’s deficit alone is projected at $25.9 billion.
It’s a puzzle, indeed!
Since 2008 . . .
The rest of the free world has felt one economic earthquake after another, yet Canada continues to record year-over-year economic growth.
The United States, Britain and the Euro Zone have spent trillions of dollars to bail out their banks. Canada has not.
The rest of the world saw its citizen’s wealth disappear overnight as house prices and investments collapsed. In Canada, real estate has been stable or increasing. Wealth has been sustained and many ordinary Canadians have purchased second homes in countries with ravaged economies.
While the rest of the world’s unemployment levels are equivalent to the Great Depression, Canada finds it necessary to introduce temporary foreign worker programs and fund training to try and keep up with major labour shortages.
And yet . . .
the Harper Government has not been able to deliver a balanced budget since their second year in office.
We freaked out when the Alberta budget deficit was announced on March 7 and yet two weeks later, there was nary a word of dismay over the $25.3 billion budgeted deficit in Ottawa.
A deficit is a deficit. Why do we curse one and accept the other? Both levels of government are living beyond their means?
Is it because we are easily distracted by presentation, or are we just unable to separate our political philosophy from bad performance?
The federal government has wrapped its five-successive budget deficits into a bundle called “Canada’s Economic Action Plan–Working for YOU”.
Multi-million dollar, taxpayer-funded advertisements and millions of road signs seems to have lulled us into accepting deficit budgeting at the federal level even though we are fundamentally opposed to government debt.
Canadians had an expectation that Harper’s government would be different especially on the fiscal and accountability side of the ledger. Instead the Harper Team has become masters at hiding massive budget deficits behind a costly but highly effective marketing strategy.
But whether we rationalize “the ends justify the means” (it’s more important to maintain power than to govern ethically), the fact remains the federal Conservatives are systematically growing the national debt at an alarming rate, and nobody seems to care!