Public perception’s the main Liberal goal

Who wouldn’t want to be Santa Claus, fulfilling the wishes and dreams of everyone who asks? Unfortunately, there’s just one Father Christmas whose only limits are the imaginations of children. For anyone who doesn’t live at the North Pole, resources are finite.

The Liberal government, however, may not see it that way. The new administration seems to be comfortable picking up the tab at every opportunity, offering help no matter what it costs, writing blank cheques to anyone who asks.

David Chilton, author of the Wealthy Barber, often talks about how people get into debt with a flawed attitude toward spending money they don’t have. If we’re going to renovate the bathroom we might as well do the kitchen too. Let’s go for the marble countertop — it’s only a bit more. What a great deal this is — we can’t afford not to do it!

That’s effectively how the Liberals have approached government so far. Justin Trudeau promised to adopt all 94 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission before he knew their full implications, including how much they would cost.

When it was time to go to the climate change conference in Paris, Trudeau brought 300 people with him, a delegation twice the size of the American contingent and triple the British cohort. He’s made open-ended promises to the provinces about health care and pension reform.

There’s no problem that a little cash can’t solve. And when managing money isn’t at the top of your list of priorities, it’s not a priority at all. If you can justify one expenditure, it’s easy to justify another, then another. Before you know it, a $10-billion deficit becomes $20 billion. Or more.

To the Trudeau team, the only resource that needs to be managed is public perception. If people can be convinced that deficits are acceptable, then there is inherently nothing wrong with them. The discussion over how to manage government finances has become a communications exercise rather than a fiscal debate.

For a time, during the 1990s, it was out of fashion for governments to borrow money. Apparently, rather than a new standard in politics, that was just a phase we went through. Now it’s no longer cool to balance the books.

Even the word that is applied to balanced budgets — austerity — has a negative connotation, as though living within your means is some sort of extreme behaviour.

It’s not just the federal government. The province of Ontario also considers balanced budgets to be an “aspirational” goal, a term meaning ‘we wrote it down somewhere but we have no plan to actually achieve it.’ Curiously, the province prohibits municipalities from running deficits because that would be, you know, wrong.

Despite what some people think, this isn’t entirely a matter of perspective. Changing the way people think about deficits — convincing them they are just numbers, without long-term consequences — doesn’t alter their actual impact any more than convincing people that time has slowed down means it actually has.

When you borrow money to buy something, you increase the cost of it. Eventually you will have less money to spend on other things. And invoking an arbitrary metric like debtto-GDP ratio doesn’t change that fact.

What Trudeau and Premier Kathleen Wynne seem to ignore is that fiscal responsibility isn’t one of a long list of issues competing for government attention any more than inhaling oxygen is just one of many items on your to-do list for the day. Money doesn’t contend with the other priorities; it pays for them.

It took courage for Trudeau to pledge to run deficits when his opponents campaigned on balanced budgets. But it takes a different quality altogether to add to, rather than achieve, the promised shortfall.

The Liberals may take pride in their many decisions to solve problems such as climate change.

But leadership is about making choices. And the most important choice for government is how to allocate the limited resources that are available. When you behave as though the resources are unlimited, you’re not demonstrating responsibility, you’re abdicating it.

Deciding to do everything is not making a decision at all.