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More detailed numbers would have to wait until the Fall Economic Statement, but again, the government did the best it could to avoid talking about them. Pride of place was given to announcements of new infrastructure programs, and the budget projections — now a $98.1 billion deficit over four years, instead of $25 billion over two years — were given second billing. But if the economic statement had included the long-term update and its projections of deficits until the year 2050, then the Liberals might have been obliged to spend more time explaining why they had chosen to send Canada down this path, and not the one it had promised to follow in the election campaign.

The obvious inference to draw is that the Liberals didn’t want to talk about the long-term outlook, and so it was dropped from the fall statement. The government couldn’t suppress it completely — there’s the whole business of the Auditor-General’s recommendation — so they did the next best thing, by both publishing the report and doing their best to pretend it didn’t exist.

The Liberals campaigned on a promise to run a more transparent government than the Conservatives, but we still don’t know what the Liberals’ long-term plan is. (The Conservative plan, on the other hand, was crystal clear: steadily lower taxes and spending. You may not have liked the plan, but at least you know what it was.) We don’t even know if the Liberals have even given the question much thought. All we really know is that the Liberals have long since abandoned the plan they campaigned on: to run a modest, short-lived deficit and then return to balance. But we still don’t know how or why they arrived at that decision, and they’ve been doing their best to avoid discussing the matter.

There’s a point where games stop being fun. The Liberals should get serious about the future — and the upcoming budget would be as a good place as any to start.

National Post

Stephen Gordon is a professor of economics at Université Laval.