Kenney bucks spendthrift trend on his way out

The real pain is about to begin.

All that borrowing, that accumulated debt, those rock-bottom interest rates making it all possible, are finally coming home to roost with a vengeance.

The central bankers are trapped in a cage of their own making, including those here in Canada, now wailing that none of this is their fault. Of course, it never is.

So, heaven help any country, company or individual borrowing in U.S. dollars — something inevitable in many parts of the world — as the globe's collective currencies get thrown head-first onto the manure pile: the Japanese yen and British pound being the current showstoppers for head-spinning, precipitous declines.

Still, the loonie's getting battered as well, which won't help our inflation fight considering how much we buy from south of the border.

And the only way the Bank of Canada can halt that currency slide is to jack up interest rates further and faster, therefore ensuring we do our part in ensuring a global economic meltdown. Soon, those halcyon days of five per cent mortgages will be little more than a vague memory.

No doubt the phone lines will be humming this week in the office of U.S. Federal Reserve head honcho Jerome Powell, who'll eventually carry the can for the upcoming debacle, seeing it is his committee's zest in raising rates that kicked off this firestorm by making the U.S. dollar the most preferable dirty shirt in a basket overflowing with grubby currencies.

Powell's Fed was reluctantly forced into this to combat inflation, which is its main mission after all, but the subsequent rush into the

U.S. dollar is now obliterating debt-soaked economies worldwide and, ironically, making global inflation even more of an issue.

But this nightmare scenario has been smouldering for years: governments using cheap, borrowed money to pull forward future consumption and thereby paper over an appalling lack of real productivity growth. In the end, it wasn't the news that was fake, it was the economy.

There is only one solution to this mess and it's an ugly one. All the bubbles are popping and with them will go the assets of ordinary folk who believed these politicians and bankers knew what they were doing.

Meanwhile, the man who believes in a budgetary tooth fairy that can balance itself better than gymnast Olga Korbut in her prime will no doubt once more declare he feels our pain.

Then Justin Trudeau will do what he always does, borrow even more money and hand it out willy-nilly with wanton disregard and thus force Canada's own central bank to keep raising the very borrowing rates that are causing this horror show to unfold.

Good times, bad times, middling times, the answer's always the same with the federal government. Heck, they'd make Marie Antoinette appear a paragon of fiscal responsibility: “Cake? You want more cake? Sure. And here, have some apple pie as well. It's all free.”

Meanwhile, here in Alberta, despite its foibles — and boy, this bunch certainly has a hankering for those foibles — what still remains of the Jason Kenney government at least bucked this heedless trend by not immediately spending all that magic cash pouring into its coffers thanks to ballooning energy prices. (Though even that bubble's now starting to pop.)

The premier recently announced the UCP planned to pay off more than $13 billion in accumulated debt, while also allowing the Heritage Savings Trust Fund to retain its earnings instead of siphoning off the money into general revenues. (We'll see if his successor has the fortitude not to usurp such rare common sense, but instead engage in some massive pre-election giveaway. Bet on the latter.)

So, some rare praise for our current premier as he prepares to exit, stage right. Someone in charge finally figured out that what goes up in Wildrose land can come down just as sharply.

Similar to Shakespeare's unfortunate Thane of Cawdor, it seems nothing in Kenney's provincial political life will become him like the leaving of it.