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“It’s obvious that none of us has much room to maneuver, and some central banks have literally none left,” Poloz said in an interview with BNN Bloomberg after the interest-rate announcement. “This is when fiscal policy is most powerful and monetary policy is the least powerful. We’ve known that for a really long time. This is not a revelation.”

It might be a revelation to some members of Canada’s political elite.

Alberta’s new United Conservative government has decided that erasing a $9-billion deficit in four years is the best thing it can do for the province’s fragile economy, even though debt is only about 12 per cent of GDP, the lowest in the country.

The world has changed and fiscal frameworks must be reviewed as well Ángel Ubide, head of economic research at Citadel LLC

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer directed his 201,386 Twitter followers to an “important read” on fiscal policy in the Financial Post by Gwyn Morgan, the former chief executive of Encana Corp. and a member of the Order of Canada. Morgan lamented Trudeau’s deficits, saying the budget shortfall “leaves no financial room for a recession.” He drew parallels with Pierre Trudeau’s tenure as prime minister through the 1970s and early 1980s, when “immense public spending overheated the economy, resulting in runaway inflation.” And he said Canada’s economy had become “dependent” on “ever bigger government spending,” necessary because so many other policy choices “discourage private investment.”

Quarterly investment in non-residential structures and machinery and equipment has hovered around nine per cent of GDP since the start of 2016, down from a peak of almost 12 per cent at the end of 2014, but better than the eight-per-cent average since 1961, which is as far back as Statistics Canada data goes.