What would the New Democrats do if they won power? In an open letter to Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, Toronto MP Peggy Nash, the party’s finance critic, provides a few hints.

Her letter marks a welcome respite from the usual political bromides about the horrors of fiscal deficits. Putting government spending and revenue into balance is a worthy abstract goal. But in the real world, it can cause more harm than good.

Nash gets this. She warns Flaherty that in his rush to balance the books, he risks prolonging a slump that has already lasted six years.

She notes — correctly — that unemployment remains stubbornly high and that the savants of the International Monetary Fund predict more trouble for the Canadian economy.

Indeed, IMF economists have gently suggested to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government that it delay its budget balancing plans should the economy turn particularly sour.

So what would the New Democrats do differently?

First, they wouldn’t be bound by Flaherty’s ironclad 2015 deadline for eliminating the deficit.

“We shouldn’t be sacrificing jobs and growth to an artificial deadline,” Nash said in a telephone interview. Conservative austerity measures, she went on, are keeping the jobless rate, now about 7 per cent, higher than it otherwise would be.

“We want the books balanced,” she went on. “But if that takes an extra year, for example, we wouldn’t worry.”

Nor, she added, would the NDP necessarily fret if budget-balancing took an extra two years to accomplish — or even longer. The government’s central aim must be to encourage the kind of economic growth that creates jobs.

While deficits should be eliminated over time, the idea of a balanced budget should not become a fetish.

Second, the NDP would spend more to create jobs. Nash says the Conservatives should reintroduce one of their own programs, shut down in 2012, which had offered subsidies to homeowners wishing to retrofit their homes in order to save energy.

The NDP also wants two new wage subsidy programs. One would give a $1,000 tax credit to any small business hiring a new worker. Another would offer tax credits to employers who hire and train those under the age of 25.

On the crucial issue of infrastructure funding, the NDP isn’t calling on Ottawa to spend more in total. But it does want spending that is scheduled to take place, say, five years from now moved up.

Repairing bridges, highways and sewers now when interest rates are low, says Nash, would not only boost employment but save money.

Third, the NDP would pay for an estimated $500 million a year in the new spending it wants by raising some taxes (although not personal income taxes).

Canada’s corporate tax rate would be hiked but kept lower than that of the United States.

The New Democrats would also eliminate or reduce some tax breaks available to individuals and corporations. Which ones? Nash isn’t yet ready to say.

None of these suggestions is radical. Today’s NDP doesn’t want to nationalize the banks or otherwise capture the commanding heights of the economy.

Indeed, my guess is that if Mulcair did become prime minister, the NDP’s minimalist demands for laws to cap bank credit-card interest rates and ATM fees would quietly evaporate.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Still, his New Democrats are on the right track. They understand that Canada’s economic priority should be jobs and incomes. They understand government has a role to play in this. They are not quite as terrified of breaking away from the orthodoxy of balanced budgets as they used to be.

They may not be saying much. But unlike, say, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, they are saying something.