Anyone who has ever been a manager must be shaking their head. Imagine having a long-term employee who has held positions of ever-increasing responsibility. Lately they have been expressing unease at the direction you’re taking things. They’ve been charged with producing an important policy paper, but you haven’t let them put their own ideas in it. Instead, you have directed that it contain only your views. The document is to be presented on Monday. On Friday you call them and tell them that, after they have delivered the document, they are out of the job.
What did you really expect them to do? Go out and endorse ideas they don’t agree with?
Of course Chrystia Freeland quit. Of course she didn’t present the economic update. And Trudeau completely underestimated her, thinking that she would go quietly like the good soldier she’s been for the last nine years. Instead she published her resignation letter, with plenty of barbs planted between the lines. She found her backbone, albeit too late.
To lose one minister looks like bad luck. To lose two looks like carelessness. To lose nine?
The update said the deficit would be $62 billion, 50% higher than forecast in the budget a few months ago. To get it so wrong speaks to the (in)ability of so many people. Staggering incompetence.
Economic theory, going back to the time of Keynes 100 years ago, recognizes that sometimes a deficit is useful and desirable. But Keynes was incredible conservative by our measure – when, during the great Depression, unemployment finally fell below 10%, Keynes advocated strongly that government spending be cut back, deficits having done the job.
There is nothing going on in the Canadian economy to justify a $62 billion surplus. Many of our problems arguably stem from the stream of deficits over the last nine years.
We’ve seen governments in their death throes before. This is an unusually vivid case.
“It is not fit that you should sit here any longer. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing lately … In the name of God go.“ (Oliver Cromwell, 1653)