Tories have not used sound management
Re: “Good deeds, bad ideas,” April 22
In an otherwise fairly balanced piece on the federal budget, Andrew Coyne compliments the Conservative government on achieving the lowest net debt-to-GDP ratio among the G7 countries, calling it a genuine achievement. Similarly, in his pre-budget April 21 article, “Road to balanced budget ran through a gusher of red ink,” Jason Fekete also says that Canada’s federal debt-to-GDP ratio is “far below the G7 average.”
But why only compare it to other G7 countries, which have economies that are much larger than Canada’s and structurally dissimilar? Why not compare it to the much more representative Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, many of whose members have economies much closer in scale to ours? Out of the 31 member countries for which the OECD gives figures, no fewer than 20 have better debt-to- GDP ratios than Canada. (The OECD uses gross debt-to-GDP, but presumably the results are not that much different for net debt.) Those of Australia and New Zealand, for example, are about one-third of Canada’s ratio.
Likewise, in 2013, the Tories boasted that Canada had outstripped all other G7 countries in job creation, adding more than one million jobs since the depth of the recession in 2009. But, again, the OECD shows Canada ranking 20th out of 34 countries in job creation between 2007 and 2012.
So, by these measures, Canada is well below the average.
It seems to me that, by using only the G7 comparison (which the Tories like to employ all the time), Coyne and Fekete are merely reinforcing the mantra that the Harper Conservatives are sound economic managers. The facts seem to suggest otherwise. The Chrétien-Martin governments racked up nine consecutive budget surpluses. Harper has given us seven deficits in a row, culminating in a tiny surplus which was only achieved by selling off assets, raiding the contingency fund and heavily cutting the defence budget, among others. That’s not sound economic management in my book.