Harper's Growth Record Is the Worst Since R.B. Bennett

Stephen Harper went to Russia this week to lecture G-20 countries about fiscal responsibility. It all rang a bit hollow because of his fiscal record here at home.

In 2006, he was handed a steadily growing economy which had generated 3.5 million net new jobs, declining debt and taxes, a decade of balanced budgets, annual surpluses at about $13-billion and fiscal flexibility projected ahead five years totaling $100-billion. That's what Mr. Harper had to work with -- the most robust fiscal situation in the western world. And he blew it in less than three years.
He over-spent by three times the rate of inflation. He eliminated all the financial shock absorbers that had been built into Canada's budgetary framework to protect against adverse events. And he put this country back into deficit again -- a structural deficit -- BEFORE (not because of) the recession which arrived in late 2008.

Mr. Harper failed to anticipate that recession. As it began, he dismissed it as just "a good buying opportunity." When he couldn't deny reality any longer, his belated stimulus plan was slow, convoluted, intensely partisan and tainted with boondoggles like that "fake lake" in Toronto and multi-million dollar misappropriations for ornamental gazebos and sidewalks-to-nowhere in Muskoka.

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