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Photo by Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press

Having wasted the opportunity to practice some caution, the Liberals now find themselves confronted by a global emergency. Trudeau has spent the week implementing a financial package Ottawa hopes will mitigate some of the impact of the virus. There will be support payments, tax deferrals, aid to business, moratoriums on debt, a boost in benefits, delays to tax payments, direct deposits to bank accounts and money for Indigenous communities. Some $82 billion in all, for now. Will it be enough? There’s no way of knowing. Will more be needed? Perhaps. It will all get tacked on top of spending plans that were already well past anything Canadians had been led to expect.

This government is not the first to blinker itself and suffer the result. Pierre Trudeau started the deficit ball rolling in the 1970s, and it grew to the point of crisis by the mid-1990s, when the Chrétien government was forced to act. Ten years later the Harper government inherited a healthy surplus. Instead of carefully shepherding its good fortune it opted for a slew of boutique tax benefits targeted at bolstering the Conservative brand among specific voting groups, until the 2008 meltdown came along and forced it, too, into a deficit-financed rescue effort.

Will it be enough? There’s no way of knowing

Once the panic subsided, Harper worked to bring the budget back to balance, under steady attack by self-styled progressives who see all spending increases as the new normal. Will Justin Trudeau do as much? Optimism in that regard would appear misplaced: this is a government that saw no need to control its spending when revenue was ample. Now it has an excuse to throw caution to the wind. The unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 outbreak, the global span of its reach, the vast disparities in countries’ ability to deal with it, the cross-border nature of the world’s interconnected economies and the supply chains on which we have come to depend all make it impossible to know how long the reverberations will be felt, and how deeply into the fabric of society they will reach.