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Spending restraint has been the hallmark of Conservative fiscal policy in the post-recession years, and the federal public service — whose unionized members are represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) — has been obliged to bear almost the full brunt of it.

Unsurprisingly, PSAC has decided to work against the re-election of the Conservatives: the reasoning is presumably that once the Conservatives go, so does the austerity. The opposition parties have not made any great effort to disabuse anyone of this belief, but there’s little reason to think that a government led by the NDP, the Liberals (or some combination) will deviate significantly from the spending agenda that the Conservatives have put in place.

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The most useful way to measure public spending is as a share of GDP, for both the level of services provided and the government’s ability to pay for them. Since GDP is a measure of economic activity, it’s useful as a proxy for the available tax base. And since changes in GDP reflect inflation, population increase and real economic growth, GDP also captures the costs of providing a given level of public services. (There is not universal agreement on this last point: Andrew Coyne, for one, prefers real per capita spending.) For a given level of services, public spending should increase in proportion with GDP.