Conservative parties in this country have a long track record over the past few decades of making claims that only they have the enlightened financial stewardship to eliminate deficit spending and start to repay the national debt.
Of course, as the old saying goes, actions speak much louder than empty platitudes and desperate appeals for votes.
Because whenever actually elected to power they, despite bemoaning Liberal government deficits, end up piling tens of billions of dollars more onto Canada’s overall debt load.
Roughly half of the nation’s debt was racked up between Stephen Harper and Brian Mulroney alone.
Granted, former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau started us along this apparently endless downward spiral of deficit spending and ballooning debt.
But to pretend any of the subsequent Conservative governments have been the fiscally genius saints they claim to be is the height of disingenuousness.
The only administrations since Trudeau Sr. started our country down the path of debt that actually held the line on deficits and even started repaying the debt were the Chrétien and Martin Liberal governments. All that is needed to confirm this fact is a brief look at the country’s debt growth since the 1970s. The only time the chart plateaus and even dips down ever so slightly rather than continuing its astronomical upward spike was under their leadership.
On a side note, austerity measures for everyday people — in other words public service spending freezing at best and cuts at worst — combined with lavish tax handouts for the wealthiest one per cent, never work out in the favour of average Canadians.
Under Harper’s tenure, the tax burden shifted for the first time in our country’s history over to the shoulders of the middle class while billion-dollar corporations continue to reap in record levels of profits and wealth keeps pooling up in offshore tax havens. In 2014, more than half of the federal government’s revenue came from personal income taxes.
Unfortunately, despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s sunny ways promises to tackle inequality, that situation does not seem poised to change much as the Liberal government has not taken adequate action to address this situation by closing legal tax loopholes.
Yet to pretend Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer, who aspires to take the reins after the coming election, will somehow save the day is to frankly delude ourselves. Tax breaks for the wealthy combined with austerity measures for the rest of us do not work; in fact such economic policy tends to exacerbate the situation.
It should by now be beyond clear that the Conservatives and Liberals are nothing more than different sides of the same neoliberal, pro-corporate coin. What alternatives that leaves us with, we're not sure.
But like The Who once famously sang, let’s hope we don’t get fooled again.
— Ducatel is the Round Up’s editor
