Canada’s Conservative government insists it is strengthening the economy. It is not. It is abandoning it.

The reasons are political. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his finance minister, Jim Flaherty, now have only one goal in mind — the 2015 federal election.

And they are determined to slash government spending in order to balance Ottawa’s books before then.

They calculate that a fiscal surplus in 2015 will allow their party to offer voters a platter of tasty tax cuts that will win it four more years in power.

In normal times, any effort to eliminate Ottawa’s $18 billion deficit would be welcome news. There is nothing inherently virtuous about incurring debt.

But in these times, a fixation on cost-cutting can only hurt. The global economy remains unbearably weak. The U.S. is starting to revive. But thanks in part to a dysfunctional and bitterly divided political leadership in Washington, the pace of that revival is slow and uncertain.

In Canada, the official unemployment rate still hovers near 7 per cent. The Canadian Labour Congress calculates that when those who have given up looking for work plus involuntary part-time employees are added in, the real jobless rate reaches about 17 per cent.

The country remains divided. Canadians able to take advantage of the oil boom are doing all right. But those connected to manufacturing, particularly in Ontario, are not.

The rich make good money. Census figures show that those in the top one per cent of income earners average $381,300 a year — about 10 times the national average.

Yet those at the bottom find they need two or three minimum-wage jobs just to stay alive. Debt-burdened students graduate from university and college only to find that full-time jobs simply don’t exist.

As Erin Weir, an economist with the Steelworkers union, noted recently, there are now six unemployed workers for every unfilled job opening in Canada.

Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz is warning that the economy remains too fragile for him to raise interest rates.

Flaherty used to echo these warnings. But now he is fixated on politics. And Conservative politics demand austerity.

They demand austerity because the government is pitching to a very specific segment of the voting public — those who feel they don’t need government services but who would be delighted to face lower taxes.

Harper won a solid majority of Commons seats in 2011 by focusing on this segment and he plans to do the same again.

But the cost to the country has been staggering. Federal government direct program spending, on everything from meat inspection to environmental enforcement, has been scaled back dramatically.

As the Globe and Mail reported this week, even Americans are worried about Canada’s lacklustre food safety system.

On top of its overt cutbacks, the government is quietly refusing to spend all the monies authorized by Parliament. The Parliamentary Budget Office says that over the last three years this so-called lapsing authority has totaled $10 billion.

All of this is having a direct effect on jobs. The Parliamentary Budget Office says Ottawa’s spending cuts cost the economy 12,000 jobs last year. It estimates that this figure will rise to about 80,000 by 2016.

Up to now, Harper and Flaherty were careful to leave their options open. Both routinely warned that the fragility of the world economy might interfere with their budget-balancing plans. In 2009, the Harper government willingly incurred billions in debt to get the shell-shocked Canadian economy moving again.

“It really did work,” says Toronto economist Arthur Donner. “It got us out of a major slump. But now they’re removing all that.”

Indeed they are. Under the self-imposed pressure of politics, austerity rules.

If the world economy were truly recovering, none of this might matter. A vibrant U.S. could pull Canada along with it.

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But evidence is mounting that we will be in this mess for a while. Larry Summers, U.S. President Barack Obama’s former economic adviser, is predicting years more of stagnation.

In such a world, fixating on deficits is madness. Nonetheless, Flaherty and Harper are rolling the dice. The stakes are dangerously high.

Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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