A rchive Date
[ 04-06-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/corbella.html
Look before you leap to Martin camp
By LICIA CORBELLA - Calgary Sun
June 4, 2002
Over and over again, everyone from seasoned political pundits to your average person on the street keeps saying: "Paul Martin is the best Finance Minister this country ever had."
What that statement proves is how short people's memories are and how biased their thinking is.
What they need to do is ask themselves this question: What's more noteworthy, someone who inherits a bag of rusted out bolts and spare parts and after years of toil turns the mess into a sleek, well-oiled machine, or someone who inherits the well-oiled machine and manages to keep it running at a steady pace?
I'll say the first is the real genius worthy of the kudos, not the latter, though that's not to say that Martin hasn't had his own challenges - his boss being the primary one.
After all, during the general election campaign that saw Chretien's Liberals swept to power in 1993, Chretien was on the record as saying: "zero deficit equals zero hope."
In other words, he wasn't in favour of balancing the country's books, just continuously spending at breakneck speeds, like all the Liberal governments he was ever involved in.
Luckily for this country, however, our former finance minister was Michael Wilson, a man of integrity and brains in the Brian Mulroney government, which actually had agendas and visions for this country which may not have been popular but were essential to our health in so many areas.
In 1984, the Mulroney government inherited a terrible mess. In fact, even Jean Chretien admitted, following 15 years in office: "We left the cupboard bare."
That, frankly, was putting it mildly. The Liberals didn't just leave the cupboard bare, they pulled the cupboard right off the wall and left a gaping hole in the promise of this country. In 1984, the Tories inherited a deficit of $38.5 billion, which was nearly 9% of GDP - the largest in the history of Canada.
The federal debt had increased by 1,100% under the Trudeau administration. Remember the interest rates? They had peaked at 22.75%. Program spending had skyrocketed to $1.23 for every dollar collected in taxes.
As Mulroney stated in a speech delivered in Halifax last week, "Mr. Chretien constantly trashes our economic record to camouflage an important fact: The Trudeau government (in which he served as Minister of Finance) left behind the largest deficit by far in our history and so damaged the public finances of Canada that it has taken almost 20 years of hard slogging by successor government to reverse a calamitous heritage."
In contrast, let's look at what kind of financial legacy Chretien and Martin inherited in 1993.
"When we left office almost nine years later, the federal government was in an operating surplus and the deficit as a percentage of GDP had been reduced by one-third, despite the deep recession of 1990-91," said Mulroney during his Halifax speech.
"The rate of growth in program spending was slashed by 70%, reducing it to 97 cents for every dollar of revenues. The prime rate was at 6%, the lowest in 20 years. The inflation rate was 1.5%, the lowest in 30 years, and the United Nations had just reported that, in terms of quality of life, Canada was the number one country in the world," said Mulroney.
Quite a nice machine for Paul Martin to inherit, wasn't it.
Fact is, if Martin had inherited the kind of legacy left to Michael Wilson, I doubt very much that he would have been able to turn the ship of state around - not so much because of him, but more because of who his boss is.
Ironically, the foundation for Martin's success was laid down by Mulroney and Co. Part of that foundation is Mulroney's vision of removing interventionist policies like the Foreign Investment Review Agency and the National Energy Program with the North American Free Trade Agreement.
They may not have been popular acts, but they were the right ones. Who could say such a thing about Chretien?
One of the great things about Chretien's firing of Martin on Sunday is people are starting to realize how little Chretien had to do with this country's recent success. Maybe now they'll start recognizing how little Martin had to do with it too.
Licia Corbella, editor of the Calgary Sun, can be reached at 403-250-4129 or by e-mail at licia.corbella@calgarysun.com. Her columns appear Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Letters to the editor should be sent to callet@sunpub.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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