Critics may not like Stephen Harper’s economic policy. But at least it has been coherent.

That is, it has been coherent until now.

Now it is flying on the proverbial wing and a prayer.

The Conservative government says that it can spend billions more on tax breaks and expanded baby-bonus cheques without cutting other kinds of spending — and without running a deficit.

It says it can achieve this politically delightful result even though the economy overall is slowing.

An analysis released Tuesday by the independent Parliamentary Budget Office indicates that it is theoretically possible for the federal government to achieve all of these goals simultaneously.

But that happy result, the watchdog agency says, will occur only if sagging oil prices, now near $46 a barrel, start to bounce back quickly.

Moreover, the Parliamentary Budget Office bases its relatively sanguine conclusions on the assumption that Canada’s real economy, adjusted for inflation, will grow by 2.6 per cent this year — as the government predicted last fall.

Economists now say that prediction is singularly optimistic. The Toronto-Dominion Bank, for instance, said this week that it expects the economy to grow by only 2 per cent in 2015.

This drop isn’t enough to send Canada into recession. But it is enough to prevent the Harper government from meeting all of its contradictory fiscal and political goals this year.

Up to now, the prime minister has had a coherent and disciplined approach to the economy.

The basic elements were classically conservative. The Harper government cut taxes. And then it cut spending to push its accounts back towards balance.

During the recession of 2009, the prime minister experimented with textbook Keynesian remedies, running up record deficits to stimulate spending.

He then spent the next five years trimming spending in order to pay down those deficits — another textbook response.

Throughout, the government benefited from a worldwide boom in commodities such as oil.

The boom kept the economy in oil-rich provinces like Alberta humming. That in turn provided the tax revenue that allowed the federal government to move back towards a balanced budget.

Along the way, there was plenty to criticize. The Harper government’s fixation with commodities and pipelines led it to slash environmental regulations.

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Its fascination with oil and the magic of market forces didn’t cause it to neglect Ontario manufacturing entirely (Harper was happy to subsidize the province’s big auto companies).

But throughout the tough years following 2008, the government paid far less attention to other Ontario manufacturers, particularly those hamstrung by what was, until recently, a grossly overvalued Canadian petrodollar.

Still, Harper’s approach was consistent. Mean-spirited maybe, particularly to the jobless, far too many of whom were denied employment insurance. But consistent.

Now it is not. Now, the prime minister is caught in a trap of his own making.

He has promised a balanced budget this year. But he has also promised families with kids that they will get pricey tax breaks and expanded subsidies.

With an election in the offing, he is loath to renege on any of these pledges.

Yet deep in his heart, Harper must know that he can’t do it all. Something will have to give.

That may explain why the government has delayed its budget until at least April. It may also explain why the prime minister prefers, as he did Tuesday in the Commons, to wax eloquent about Canada’s military mission in Iraq.

“If they (Canadian troops) kill (Islamic State) terrorists, Canadians are going to support that,” the prime minister said, to great applause from the government benches.

He was also asked about budget timing. Harper the economist might have answered that question. Harper the wartime prime minister chose not to.

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

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