Trudeau plays budgetary blame game

Ah, the blame game — do politicians ever tire of playing it?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau clearly has not, and he used his end-of-session news conference last week to defend his government’s fiscal performance by lobbing a billions-big budgetary blame bomb in the direction of former prime minister Stephen Harper.

Mr. Trudeau insisted Tuesday, as he addressed reporters in Ottawa after the end of Parliament’s spring session, that his Liberal government has kept its promise to be fiscally responsible, despite having produced higher-than-expected deficit numbers. How could he make such a statement, given the bottomline-inclined nature of the balance-sheet figures? Why, by blaming the Tories, of course. Mr. Trudeau said the Liberals, who most certainly did not run on an austerity-focused platform in 2015, have been true to their pledge of about $10 billion in new spending during their first year in office.

The problem, he explained, is that upon taking office, the Liberals discovered that their Harper-led predecessors had left a baseline deficit of $18 billion rather than the balanced budget they had earlier predicted.

How Mr. Trudeau came up with the $18-billion figure was the subject of immediate and rather heated discussion in the nation’s capital.

“Did he find it in a Cracker Jack (box), or what?” was Conservative MP Gerard Deltell’s response. “Because this is all wrong.”

Indeed, there does seem to be some convenient accounting involved, on both sides, in determining just exactly who left what to whom when the Liberals seized control of the federal government from the Conservatives. At the mathematical centre of the issue is the 2015-16 fiscal year, which was completed partly under the watch of the Harper government and partly under Mr. Trudeau’s newly elected Liberals.

The Tories had projected a budget surplus of $1.4 billion for that year; in the end, 2015-16 produced a $1-billion deficit — created, Conservatives insist, by new Liberal spending.

But the $18.4-billion baseline deficit referred to by Mr. Trudeau — and, earlier, by the office of Finance Minister Bill Morneau — remains, so far, unexplained. That’s quite convenient, from a casting-aspersions perspective, but without a detailed breakdown, it’s hard to defend. Clearly, however, the point of Tuesday’s media-session exercise was to introduce the dubious deficit figure, point the finger of blame and then head swiftly for the summer-break exit.

As for the future, Mr. Trudeau’s government will almost certainly continue to break its promise to run annual shortfalls of no more than $10 billion over its first three years in power and to eliminate the deficit by 2020. In the current fiscal year, the Liberals are predicting a $28.5-billion deficit.

Mr. Trudeau declined to answer questions Tuesday about when his government might eventually balance its books (one report published on the federal Finance department’s website suggests Ottawa could be on track to post annual deficits until at least 2050-51).

Mr. Trudeau said his government’s focus has been on growing the economy rather than arbitrarily slaying the deficit with austerity measures. “We’re always going to be fiscally responsible in the decisions we make,” he explained.

The numbers won’t lie, even if Mr. Trudeau continues to follow the long Ottawa tradition of financial accounting that conveniently massages the truth. And by the time Mr. Trudeau faces the media with his next end-of-session address, he will no longer have a Tory bottom line to blame for his government’s fiscal performance.

(This editorial was published in the Winnipeg Free Press June 29 and circulated by the Canadian Press.)