Brian Mulroney took responsibility for federal spending and took steps to bring it under control. Jean Chrétien simply offloaded federal debt onto the provinces
An editorial in Saturday’s National Post posed the question of whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals will follow former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s example when he balanced the budget. Let’s hope they don’t, as there is a right and a wrong way to do things.
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s government cut the average increase in program spending by 70 per cent, from 14 per cent a year over the previous 15-year period, to 4.1 per cent a year. In fact, according to the Fraser Institute, Mulroney’s government recorded average annual per-person spending declines of 0.3 per cent, making him one of only two prime ministers in Canadian history to have done so.
That would be the right way to proceed when faced with tough fiscal choices. The wrong way is to make someone else pay for it, which is precisely the approach that Chrétien and his finance minister, Paul Martin, adopted. Their cuts to transfer payments, particularly for health care, averaged 24 per cent between 1995 and 1998, leaving debt as their largest provincial transfer.
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