Scheer nonsense

I know it's the last stages of the Federal election campaign and people are getting tired and querulous.  Still, I can't escape the feeling that Andrew Scheer's Conservatives are genuinely clueless when it comes to fiscal policy.

Throughout the campaign, we've been seeing Tory TV spots arguing that "Justin Trudeau will keep hiking taxes to pay for his endless deficits".  The endless deficits part is sort of true -- Trudeau is not promising any date for a return to balanced budgets -- but the logic of the statement as a whole escapes me. I mean, if Trudeau's Liberals are going to raise taxes, that should reduce the deficit, shouldn't it?

Now Scheer is doubling down on the same argument. Speaking today in Fredericton NB, he warned that a Liberal/NDP coalition (a not-unlikely outcome if the polls can be believed) would hike the Federal portion of the Goods and Services tax by 2 percentage points, cut transfer payments to Provinces (a hot button for a have-not Province like New Brunswick) -- and run a deficit of $40 billion.  There's no evidence for this and Trudeau has promptly denied he has any such plans.  The point is, though, that if a government of any stripe imposed a big hike in sales tax and cut transfer payments at the same time, it would find it almost impossible to rack up a deficit anywhere close to $40 billion.

It appears that Scheer can't make up his mind whether to attack his opponents as tax-and-spenders or as deficit-and-spenders. They're not the same thing, and in conflating them Scheer is coming very close to talking complete nonsense.  Oh well, only three days until voting day, but it's looking very unlikely that we will get a clear-cut result.  That's bad news for Scheer, whose only plausible coalition partner would seem to be the pro-sovereignty Bloc Quebecois.  He wouldn't dare, would he??