On the economy, the opposition is missing a chance to score

Though the Conservatives have lost a whopping amount of support since the last election, they still hold the advantage of being seen as the best economic managers.

Opposition parties have been unable to exploit the economy’s weaknesses. They’ve been run over by the constant Conservative refrain about Canada doing better in tough times than other countries. If the Liberals and New Democrats can’t knock that pigeon over by shifting the debate out of the comparative context, they’re in trouble.

Recently, they’ve received some help. New economic statistics are painting a not-so-happy picture. John Manley, head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, took issue with a number of developments this week. Among other things, he singled out Canada’s lack of a labour market policy. “The absence of a coherent national approach to education and skills development policy,” he said, “puts Canada at a significant disadvantage relative to other leading economies.” The government’s proposed Canada Jobs Grant, he added, is not enough to address the problem.

Mr. Manley raised the matter of the government failing to make a strong push for a strategic economic partnership with China. Indeed, China seems to have dropped off the federal radar in the last year. He spoke of the need to develop a comprehensive strategy to expand and enhance cross-border energy infrastructure. He repeated a call from chief executives for Ottawa to introduce a price on carbon emissions and he pressed the prime minister on getting a European free trade agreement done.

Manley served as one of Jean Chretien’s finance ministers, but in his current position he’s hardly viewed as a strong Liberal partisan. A more partisan view came this week from Ralph Goodale, Paul Martin’s former finance minister, who with charts and graphs argued that Stephen Harper “has the poorest economic growth record since R.B. Bennett.” That may be partisan — it’s also quite an indictment, since Bennett was in office during the deepest trough of the Great Depression.

Many of the growth problems under the Conservatives have, of course, been due to a global recession not of their making. And before anyone gets too exercised about our economic plight, there are several positive developments to be considered. Low inflation. Low interest rates. A projected growth rate higher than those in other G8 countries. Lower poverty rates than we’re used to, and substantial increases in Canadians’ per capita net worth. And an unemployment rate which, while nothing to write home about, isn’t bad, considering the climate.

But an overall growth record that, as Goodale claims, is worse than that of any government in eight decades still has a powerful ring to it — and it’s something on which the Liberals should be blasting Harper daily. If the Conservatives were in opposition and the Grits were putting up those numbers, you can be sure the Tories wouldn’t be letting them off the hook with talk of ‘global conditions’.

Another point Goodale’s been hammering home is the spike in our national debt under the Tories: the figure he cites is $169 billion. There’s been a lot of talk about the deficit, a problem which was worsened by the government’s two per cent decrease in the GST. But the debt hike has not received the attention it’s due. Under Chretien and Martin, as Goodale noted, the debt-to-GDP ratio was cut by more than half. Under the Tories there’s been no reduction in that ratio.

Some other statistics of recent vintage are hardly flattering. Newly released global competitiveness rankings from the World Economic Forum place Canada at a dreary 14th. On the trade front Canada now has a billion-dollar deficit. Our current account deficit of three per cent of GDP makes Canada the worst performer in the G8 in that category.

The country’s manufacturing base is being further eroded while government policy gives full-blown priority to the resource sector. The middle class in shrinking. Our productivity rate is lousy. Depending on whose statistics you believe, inequality is either getting worse or hardly improving.

Youth unemployment, while not as bad as it’s been in some periods, is serious — and youth debt from student loans is brutal. Canadians’ standard of living stopped rising a long time ago and hasn’t been going up under this government.

Meanwhile — and the NDP and the Liberals are hitting this point, at least — the big beneficiaries of the Conservatives’ gift-giving are corporations. They’re getting a tax break of no less than thirty per cent. The corporate rate was 22 per cent in 2007 and is set to reach 15 per cent a little more than year from now.

Overall, while there have been some positive economic developments, the downsides are surely obvious enough for the opposition to make a much better case than they have been that the government’s record on the economy is hardly one of major accomplishments.

Many of the economies to which Canada compares favourably have been, if not economic basketcases, something close to it. They have not been hard to outdistance. And given Canada’s resource edge and other advantages such as our strong regulatory regime, doing better than others was hardly an accomplishment.

And yet, the Conservatives continue presenting themselves to Canadians as good stewards of the economy. The fact that they’re still getting away with it testifies more to the inadequacy of the opposition parties’ messaging talents than anything else.

Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Lawrence Martin