Recessions can happen on anyone’s ‘watch’

Harper is not the first PM to have two while in power

A phrase we could usefully delete from our political lexicon is “on his watch,” as in “such and such very bad thing happened on the prime minister’s watch.”

If a ship at sea is overtaken by a hurricane and founders, well, that’s very bad luck for the captain and all souls on the ship.

But it’s not necessarily the captain’s fault. It could be the captain’s fault, if he or she set out into the gathering storm, ignoring all warnings that things could get very bad.

Or if the captain was negligent in not battening down the hatches (whatever battening means) or trimming sail or steering into the wind (or with the wind or whichever is the best way to steer in a hurricane: presumably into the eye, if you can find it).

But if the captain did nothing wrong, maybe did everything right, and still the ship was overtaken, well, that a bad thing happened on his or her watch is basically immaterial to anything.

According to the most recent growth numbers, Canadian economic output fell from January through March and then fell again from April through June, though it did rebound nicely in June.

Those numbers are subject to revision — remember the New Yorker cartoon of a while back in which the sports anchor intones, “Final, revised government figures for the fourth quarter now indicate that the Yankees won the World Series, not the Dodgers” — but, even beyond the possibility of revision, recessionology is actually more complicated than simply two negative quarters.

Despite all that, Stephen Harper is now tagged with “two recessions on his watch.” He is hardly the first such prime minister. Sir John A. may have had as many as six on his watch, though for lack of data recessions weren’t tracked as carefully then.

No one in their right mind will blame Harper for the 2009 recession, which was triggered by a U.S. financial crisis that had nothing to do with Canada or the Tories or him. What matters is how he reacted to the economic equivalent of a hurricane.

As dispassionate a reading of the facts as is possible during a campaign is that on balance he and his government responded pretty well. They undertook the emergency spending that just about all economists, even many of us conservative ones, recommended. True, they may have enjoyed the spending too much, but, hey, they’re politicians. And they unwound it reasonably promptly.

Same thing for this latest downturn: Harper didn’t cut oil prices in half. Shale gas and geoeconomic manoeuvring by the Saudis have done that.

But did he, as his opponents argue, leave the country dangerously vulnerable by pushing Canada’s future as an “energy superpower” instead of diversifying the economy away from energy?

Despite the impressive feats of deviltry Harper-haters think him capable of, the prime minister didn’t actually put the oil in Alberta. As energy prices soared toward $150 a barrel — remember the touring authors who said it was headed for $200 and even higher? — it was market forces that poured capital and labour into the oilsands. “Energy Superpower” was mainly a marketing ploy to get Europe and Asia interested in our oil, diversifying away from our traditional customer. Federal assistance can have had only a marginal effect, and in fact it mainly aimed at finding cleaner ways to access the energy.

The alternative history in which Ottawa would have squelched development by battening down the industry with regulation or taxes or by massively subsidizing other sectors in other regions, thus redirecting a couple of points of GDP away from Alberta, is the kind of fantastical yarn you run across in Conrad or Melville’s tales of the sea.

Any government that so stubbornly defied the prevailing economic winds would have run itself onto the rocks.

At which point it’s past time to send this metaphor back to dry dock. But not before pleading one last time that we deep-six “on his watch.”