Article content continued

“The hurtful cuts of the Conservative years.” Do they mean maybe the Conservative years, 1930-35, of R.B. Bennett? Because the Conservative years of Stephen J. Harper saw federal spending go from $190.7 billion in fiscal year 2006-7 to $273.6 billion in 2015-16. That’s an increase of almost $83 billion on a base of $191 billion, which is 43 per cent.

Mind you, prices rose over those years. The Bank of Canada inflation calculator shows a 17-per-cent increase from 2006 to 2016. So in real terms spending growth was more like 26 per cent. Population also rose in the Harper years. Yes, despite the plagues and hellfire it grew by about 11 per cent. So, taking both inflation and population growth into account, real per capita spending over the Harper years rose by about 15 per cent.

It’s true there were cuts in some areas. The Harper Conservatives had their pet peeves, just as the Liberals had theirs. Think subsidies for activist lawyers, on the one hand, and Canada’s roving ambassador for religion, on the other. Each government mercilessly axed its peeves, as governments do. But if real per capita spending was rising by 15 per cent over 10 years — roughly 1.5 per cent per year — there was no net cutting going on. In that respect, the Harper Conservatives were just like all other more-or-less centrist Canadian governments, which is almost always the flavour of government Canada gets.

(Harper) and his times weren't exactly drawn from Dickens

In another respect, of course, they were quite different. The federal surplus for fiscal year 2005-6, at the very end of which Harper took over, was $13.2 billion. He ran surpluses for two more years but then in 2009-10 he broke the bank and posted a deficit of $56.4 billion, which in nominal terms was and remains an all-time record. “The hurtful cuts of the Conservative years” is a funny way to describe the guy who ran the biggest nominal deficit, peacetime and wartime, in Canadian history.