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That free-spending will limit Bill Morneau’s room to manoeuvre when the finance minister eventually brings down his spring budget.

In 2009, his predecessor, the late Jim Flaherty, introduced a budget aimed at keeping the lights on in an economy that was in danger of going dark. Deficits were ramped up to $53.8 billion, or 3.5 per cent of GDP, as the Harper government’s economic action plan directed billions towards infrastructure spending, income tax relief and home renovation tax credits.

Program spending rose to 15.6 per cent of GDP and the debt-to-GDP ratio hit 35.4 per cent.

Even those debt levels were nowhere near the 68.4 per cent of the economy they soared to in 1995/96, when a biting editorial in the Wall Street Journal, headlined “Bankrupt Canada”, included this country as “an honourary member of the Third World”.

Morneau’s saving grace is that interest rates are so low that he has the flexibility to respond to worsening economic conditions without plunging the country into insolvency. (In 1995, 37¢ of every dollar went toward interest payments; that number is around 7¢ today).

Photo by Eduardo Munoz/Reuters/File

But if he is fortunate on one front, he is less so on another. As Rogoff pointed out, the coming slowdown may look more like the oil supply slump of the 1970s, with its line-ups in stores and gas stations, than the demand side recessions of the more recent past.

The normal prescription to cure a recession is a formula of tax cuts, infrastructure spending and interest rate cuts, such as the half point reduction the Bank of Canada announced on Wednesday.

But that program may not prove as effective this time.

Sharp declines in production in China and elsewhere, as workers stay home, are likely to result in supply bottlenecks and shortages – all of which could push up inflation.

It remains unclear what impact governments can have on a global supply chain that has seized up.

Canadians should have even less confidence in the ability of the new cabinet committee struck to tackle COVID-19 to have the answers. None of its members were active in federal politics in 2008, with the exception of industry minister, Navdeep Bains, and Liberal MP, Kirsty Duncan, an intriguing addition since she is an expert in virology and once wrote a book detailing her unsuccessful hunt for samples of the Spanish Flu, in the hope it would help create a vaccine against future outbreaks.