Tick, tick, tick goes the debt
National debt clock makes a reappearance in Vancouver, with each tick representing $ 1,068.62 more in the red
You thought it was dead? Nope. The national debt clock is back. And it’s ticking. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation wants you to hear — and see — the national debt running up. Once the next budget kicks in, our $ 458-billion millstone of debt will start ballooning by $ 1,068.62 a second.
But the reappearance of the debt clock — first invented here by the Vancouver Board of Trade — signifies something more than just a gimmicky reminder that Ottawa’s back into red ink.
It’s proof there’s been an almost overnight shift in Canada’s political zeitgeist, one that’s worrying fiscal conservatives and probably going to shape politics for years to come: It’s politically acceptable, once again, for politicians to spend more than the government takes in.
The red-meat eaters at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, as you might expect, aren’t pleased. They didn’t see this one coming from Stephen Harper. Here’s what Kevin Gaudet, the federation’s head, said when he launched the debt clock, at www. debtclock. ca: “ Def icit financing is like fiscal child abuse where bad spending decisions today hurt the taxpayers of tomorrow because they are the ones left to pay off the large and growing federal debt.”
Strip off the rhetorical excess and you will find a warning that still has a lot of truth to it. Runaway deficit spending hobbled Canada in the 1970s, ’ 80s and early ’ 90s. We were going into debt so fast the Wall Street Journal pred i c t e d we we r e h e a d i n g t o banana-republic-hood. It took fiscal conservatives — many of them from Vancouver and Calgary — a generation to imbed their anti-debt gospel into public policy. The Vancouver Board of Trade was a key cheerleader, putting up the first debt clock in 1990 and making sure it was nearby whenever federal leaders came to town.
“ That damn clock!” That’s what Paul Martin used to say when he spoke to the Vancouver Board of Trade. It was always on stage, ticking away. The West’s neo-con vanguard was at it, too. A freshfaced Jason Kenney, who cut his teeth with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation before entering cabinet, and Stephen Harper, a policy guru in the Reform party, made their names hectoring the old political establishment for putting us in hock. What a difference a global meltdown makes. They’re all Keynesians now.
After 11 years of balanced budgets, we now find Harper turning back the ideological clock. He’s signed off on a federal budget that will add at least $ 84 billion to the debt over three years. It’s also hard not to see the irony in Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s admission that he’s so eager to spend he’s probably going to waste money in a $ 40-billion spending spree to stimulate the economy. “ There will be some mistakes made....”
On one level, he’s simply honest. There’s no way you can shovel that much money off the federal truck without losing some. Once upon a time, though, talk like that would have had the old Stephen Harper taking him out to the woodshed.
I asked the man who ran Vancouver’s first debt clock what he made of the machine’s return. “ It’s an effective tool. The board of trade has its own debt clock back-up, too,” said Darcy Rezac. “ This is a time when you need to spend. But we’re watching it closely.”
So should we all. The moment has brought us all back to John Maynard Keynes. Spend our way out of this mess — for a time. But wa tc h th at de b t c l o c k . O u r national experience is that once politicians let the red ink flow, whether they be Liberal or Conservative, it’s tough for them to stop.