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The Conservatives, for their part, deny we are in deficit now, and warn against going into deficit in future. At the same time, they brag of the deficits they ran in previous years — the “stimulus,” they say, that saved the economy from recession, though it was not implemented until after the recession was over. But what was the vital remedy in the past — $150-billion-worth of it — would, it seems, be poison in much smaller doses now.

As for the NDP, the party that until lately never met a deficit it didn’t like now insists it will balance the budget — not just eventually, or over the life of its first government, but in its first budget. “We will not be running a deficit,” Tom Mulcair declares, though he has yet to identify what cuts in spending he would make to get us out of the one we are now in, and though he would reverse some of those the Tories made.

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Hmm. Maybe we need to make things even clearer. How’s this? NDP: we’d get rid of the deficit. Liberals: we’d keep the deficit. Tories: what deficit?

How seriously should you take any of this? It’s probably true that we are now in deficit, though not to a degree that should trouble anyone: the Parliamentary Budget Office issued a report last month projecting that the current year, fiscal 2015-16, would show a deficit of $1.5-billion. In a $2-trillion economy, that doesn’t even register as rounding error. Even if it ballooned to four times that, it would still amount to less than one-third of one per cent of gross domestic product.