The federal election campaign has slipped past the halfway mark, Labour Day is past and the Oct. 19 election day is just a month away.
If you’re sick of the constant attack ads that aired in August and early September, you haven’t seen anything yet. Prepare to be bombarded.
Voters often claim that attack advertising doesn’t influence them, but parties do it precisely because they know it usually works.
The Conservatives have been highly effective in getting their mantra to stick that Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is “Just Not Ready.” While we may find ads that comment on an opponent’s hair to be distasteful, the bigger concern is when parties – and all of them are guilty – twist the facts and misrepresent the positions and records of their opponents.
Voters need to take any claims made by politicians about their opponents with many grains of salt, but especially those relating to the economy.
Particularly dishonest is when parties take a clip of a few words from something an opponent said and completely change the meaning.
An example is the way Conservative ads have misleadingly repeated and repeated Trudeau’s statement that “the budget will balance itself” to suggest the Liberal leader is naïve about economics. In fact, Trudeau was arguing that economic growth would bring in more revenue, thereby balancing the budget. That is not an unreasonable position.
On no issue, however, have the parties been more misleading and dishonest than on the question of budget deficits. On various occasions, the Liberals and NDP have wrongly claimed that the Conservatives have run eight budget deficits in a row.
In fact, it is only six.
Despite a forecast by the Parliamentary Budget Officer that they would run a deficit in 2014-15, last week the Department of Finance announced that, in fact, there was a small surplus.
While 2015-16 may indeed show a deficit due to the impact of lower oil prices and shrinking global markets, it hasn’t happened yet and the first quarter showed a strong surplus.
But while the economic record of the Conservatives isn’t as bad as the Liberals and NDP may claim, it is equally true that the Conservatives have misrepresented the fiscal records of previous Liberal federal governments and some of the NDP provincial governments.
The former Liberal federal government ran surpluses from 1997 until they were defeated in 2006.
The Stephen Harper Conservatives ran declining surpluses in their first two years, slipping into deficit in 2008.
The following year, in 2009, they ran the largest deficit in Canadian history at $56 billion – mainly the result of the global economic downturn and large amounts of infrastructure stimulus spending.
The NDP fiscal record at the provincial level is mixed, with sound economic management in some provinces – such as Saskatchewan – but also some gaping deficits, such as Ontario Premier Bob Rae’s in the major recession of the early 1990s.
Here in B.C., the NDP government of Mike Harcourt demonstrated fiscal responsibility, while the subsequent NDP government of Glen Clark did not.
When you look at the historic record then, it is mixed for all parties and none are actually the sound economic managers they claim to be.
Probably no issue is currently seen by most Canadians as more important than the economy.
But voters should treat the economic claims of all parties with a very healthy skepticism.
