Stephen Harper faces a problem. If the Prime Minister’s Conservative government takes an axe to spending in the next budget, it risks pushing Canada’s already fragile economy back into recession.

But if it doesn’t look tough on spending, it risks alienating its fiscally conservative base.

The economy is on a knife edge. Statistics Canada announced this week that a routine maintenance shutdown in the Alberta oil patch was enough to shrink the entire country’s gross domestic product in November.

That 0.1 per cent decline in GDP, a measure of all goods and services produced during the month, wasn’t cataclysmic. But it did demonstrate how dependent the once vibrant Canadian economy has become on just one commodity — oil.

That’s because there just isn’t that much else going on. The U.S., which used to be the main market for Ontario manufacturers, is nowhere. Europe, Canada’s second-largest export market, is heading into recession.

Hanging over all of this is the eurozone debt crisis and the consequent threat of another world financial upheaval.

In such circumstances, Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty would be nuts to take a heavy-handed approach to government spending now. Money is money. Private business is not investing enough of it to keep Canada’s labour force employed. Only government can take up the slack.

For a while, it seemed that Canada’s government understood this. In November, Flaherty announced that he was delaying by a year his target date for balancing the federal government’s books.

Both he and Harper have promised to be “flexible” in their drive to eliminate the deficit.

But there is another force at play, this one political.

Harper outraged many core Conservatives when, in 2009, he decided to have the government spend billions to fight the recession. That, on top of a short-lived Liberal-NDP coalition that almost cost Harper the government, briefly sparked coup talk among some highly placed figures within his party.

True, after having won the last election handily, Harper seems very much in the driver’s seat. But the Prime Minister knows his history. Brian Mulroney’s spectacular victories in 1984 and 1988 didn’t stop Conservatives in the West from turning against him and eventually burying his Progressive Conservative party.

The serious right is unforgiving toward those it views as heretics.

All of this may explain Harper’s otherwise inexplicable decision to take on old age pensions.

In real terms, Canada’s Old Age Security system does not represent a major fiscal problem for Canada. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that Canada spends less on public pensions as a percentage of GDP than most advanced countries (including the U.S., Britain, Germany and Japan).

In terms of the ability to fund these programs up to 2050, the OECD figures that Canada is in better shape than most.

Yet Harper has deliberately targeted future retirees. Why?

The answer may be in the word “future.” If the government follows normal practice, it will leave the current pension regime intact for those over, say, 55 — so as not to thrown their retirement plans awry — and postpone any changes for five to 10 years.

That would protect the government politically from the ire of older voters, who tend to vote Conservative. It would avoid damaging the economy now, when it is at its most fragile.

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More to the point, however, it would give red meat conservatives — particularly those wealthy enough not to need Old Age Security — something to chew on.

True, middle-class Canadians now in their 20s, 30s and 40s would eventually pay the price of inferior pensions. But so what? That’s not Harper’s problem.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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