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“If the doctor says you need surgery to avoid death, the side effects usually don’t deter you, you just go ahead and manage them somehow,” Poloz said. “Other issues must be subordinate and I think of them as side effects.”

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Stephen Harper has been holding campaign style events across the country, touting the government’s stellar economic record and claiming the other guys would send us back to the dark days of the great recession.

“People should be confident about the future,” he said.

But then along comes Stephen Poloz, pointing out that things are not nearly as rosy as the Prime Minister would have people believe – and that if it had not been for him, things would be even worse.

Poloz was on a panel at the Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland on Sunday, when he said his “very controversial” quarter point interest rate cut in January had acted like life-saving surgery on an ailing Canadian economy, after the oil price collapse.

“If the doctor says you need surgery to avoid death, the side-effects usually don’t deter you, you just go ahead and manage through somehow,” he said, in defence of his decision to loosen monetary policy at a time when consumer debt to income ratios are at record highs.

The bigger problem for the Prime Minister than the Governor trotting around the globe using words like “atrocious” to describe the Canadian economy, is that Poloz is closer to the mark than he is.

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The GDP numbers for April came out Tuesday and showed the economy contracted 0.1%.That follows the three previous months of negative growth. With the second quarter just about to end, it is entirely possible that Canada is back in recession (defined as two straight quarters of economic contraction), for the first time since April 2009.