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Friday, March 13, 2015

Why are the Conservatives in abject denial about the economy?



LAWRENCE MARTIN

Tories, Liberals: Who are the better economic managers?

Ralph Goodale, the old Liberal warhorse who served as finance minister under Paul Martin, got up in the Commons last week. “In the nine years since the government took office,” he said, “job creation has been half of what it was in the nine years before.” The nine years before would be when the Liberals were in power.
 
Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded by defending his job creation record, citing the troubled world economic environment. Fair enough.
 
Then he reached for the cyanide. The Liberals, he declared, would turn Canada into another debt-drenched Greece. His government had achieved good results “by pursuing sound economic policies, reducing taxes, focused investment, balancing our budget, all of the things the Liberal Party opposes, all of the things the Liberal Party would reverse to give us the kind of result we have in Greece.”
 
Sitting down for lunch with Mr. Goodale the next day, I referenced the Hellenic comparison. Mr. Goodale chuckled. He ran through a string of economic performance comparisons. Under the Liberal Chrétien and Martin governments, he noted, the average GDP growth rate was double what it’s been under the Conservatives. The Tory rate – a 1.7 per cent average – is the lowest posted by any Canadian government since the 1930s.
 
 

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