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Huh? Wasn’t stimulus supposed to have cured the patient already? Isn’t that what the last budget was about? Whereas the previous government had sacrificed the Canadian economy on the altar of fiscal austerity, the Liberals, harnessing the very latest in economic thinking, would spend billions more than they took in, and borrow the difference — an idea that was last new in 1936, but no matter. The budget was filled with wonderful estimates of the fiscal “multiplier,” the formula by which the loaves and fishes in private hands are redoubled by virtue of being borrowed and spent by government.

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Stimulus there has certainly been. The Parliamentary Budget Officer reports spending jumped nearly six per cent in the first quarter of the current fiscal year over the last. Spending on “infrastructure,” in particular, is pouring out at a frantic rate, up 19 per cent, not directly but handed out in grants and contributions to third-parties: a spree the PBO describes as “unprecedented.” Over the summer, the National Post’s David Akin reckons the Liberals handed out 1,447 cheques worth a combined $7.8 billion. On the tax side, meanwhile, there was the celebrated middle-class tax cut, introduced last December, and increases in child benefits.

And the result of all these billions in borrowed munificence? Diddly. As a way of kick-starting economic growth, fiscal stimulus, as attempted by the government of Canada in 2016, has had about the same success it usually has: whether in the United States in the 1960s, or Britain in the 1970s, or France in the 1980s, or Japan in the last two decades — or in Canada, for that matter, on those occasions it has been tried here. (The deficits sometimes credited with hauling the economy out of the 2009 recession kicked in well after the recovery had begun.) Yet somehow the answer is always the same. If fiscal stimulus has failed to revive the economy — again — the only possible solution is more stimulus.