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So it’s not that any great calamity would befall the country if the Liberals were to carry out their plan. The debt would rise, it is true, but not enough to prevent the debt-to-GDP ratio from falling. It’s just that it’s all so pointless and ill-conceived: unnecessary, at best, and likely to involve considerable waste of public funds.

There is a legitimate and long-standing debate over the efficacy of fiscal stimulus as a means of pulling economies out of recession. A skeptic would point to the signal absence of real-world examples of the success of this approach, versus the long string of failures where it has been tried — the U.S .in the 1960s, the U.K. in the 1970s, France in the 1980s, Japan in the 1990s, and so on.

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But never mind. On paper, at least, it is still possible to describe a set of conditions in which fiscal stimulus might be of some use. But even its strongest advocates would concede that one of these should be that you are, in fact, in a recession.

As opposed, say, to now. We shall see next week whether the first two quarters of the year met the famous “technical” definition of a recession. Suppose it did: we are talking about conditions that applied anywhere from three to nine month ago. Even if we were in recession then, there is nothing to suggest that we are now.

The circumstances that created that early-year downturn — a sudden 50 per cent drop in the price of oil — have had whatever negative impact, largely confined to the energy sector, they were going to have. From here on in we are more likely to see the positive impact of cheaper oil, and the cheaper dollar that went with it, in terms of the competitiveness of central Canadian manufacturing.