Tag Archives: Liberals

Timing not right for austerity

The Liberal Party of Canada’s economic platform included running a deficit budget for three years to increase investment in infrastructure. Given the election results, Canadians agree that stimulating our sluggish economy by investing in infrastructure while interest rates are so low makes sense.

On October 23, Globe & Mail’s Eric Reguly published a column entitled,”Justin Trudeau understands that timing is crucial to austerity.” In this column, Reguly agrees with the Liberals that timing is right to steer clear of the austerity economic policies proposed by both the NDP and Conservatives in the recent federal election. Reguly points to several Canadian economists who also agree that timing is right to run a deficit budget to stimulate our economy.

What does this mean for the economic policies of our provincial Liberal Party? Will Kathleen Wynne follow Justin Trudeau’s lead and consider increasing investment in infrastructure – even if that means straying from the objective of balancing Ontario’s budget by 2017-18? Likely not, given that our provincial government has already been running deficit budgets while the federal government posted a surplus budget this year. So perhaps, we are comparing apples to oranges here. But dare to dream for increased infrastructure investment in Ontario and with that, increased spending on repairing and rebuilding Ontario’s public schools, a critical part of our society’s infrastructure!