It’s not clear there’s much they need to do—Harper is right to say that Canada’s housing market is not in the same battered shape as America’s, nor are our financial institutions as fragile—and it’s even less clear there’s much they could do. But what’s inarguable is that they won’t do much.
Whatever his complaints about Harper’s “do-nothing” attitude, Jack Layton is not going to protect your savings from sudden drops in the stock market. Four of the points in Stéphane Dion’s “five-point plan,” unveiled mid-campaign, are promises to hold meetings; the last is a commitment to spend funds that have already been committed. Nobody’s proposing to go into deficit—indeed, they all insist, with increasing implausibility, they will not —which means no fiscal “stimulus,” even if you believe that would do any good.
The only difference is that Harper makes a virtue of his inaction —sorry, his refusal to panic— whereas the other leaders insist it shows he “doesn’t get it,” or better yet, “doesn’t care,” a point of peculiar fascination to the media. The whole issue, then, can be boiled down to that famous London Sun headline, addressed to the Queen at the height of the Diana fiasco: “Show us you care, ma’am.”
What about those fiscal plans? A couple of numbers should make the point. Total program spending over the next four years, under the Conservatives: $932 billion. Total program spending, under the Liberals: $943 billion. There’s a dispute over whether the Liberals could find $12 billion (over four years) in unspecified cuts elsewhere in the budget to set against $30 billion in new spending, but please: we’re pretty much talking rounding error. One per cent does not count as “reckless,” nor does close to a trillion dollars in spending meet most definitions of “laissez-faire.”
It is true that Dion would raise taxes, net: his $40 billion in carbon tax revenues is only partly offset by $26 billion in honest-to-goodness tax cuts. The other $14 billion in tax credits should not properly be accounted as tax cuts, but as spending (as I’ve done above). But the Tories would be in a better position to make that point had they not done exactly the same thing—claimed tax credits as tax cuts. In any case, the extra costs imposed by the Liberal carbon tax are comparable to the extra costs imposed by the Conservative (and NDP) cap-and-trade scheme: though both would nominally apply to business, both would be passed on, in whole or in part, to consumers.
And while all the parties favour “putting a price on carbon,” none of them actually follow through on the logic of their position, namely that individuals and businesses can be relied upon to respond to price signals by reducing their emissions. Rather, each party insists on larding up its plan with a vast array of subsidy and regulation schemes of proven ineffectiveness, whose premise is precisely that individuals and businesses can’t be relied upon to respond to price signals, or not without government leading them by the hand.
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