- News Flash: Flaherty Maintains the Liberal Fiscal Strengths Becomes Newsmaker of the Year

Flaherty voted Canadian Press's business newsmaker of 2010, Craig Wong, The Canadian Press, Jan. 01, 2011, The lobe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/flaherty-voted-canadian-presss-business-newsmaker-of-2010/article1855168/

"Finance Minister Jim Flaherty remained the steady hand at the tiller in 2010 on his way to being voted The Canadian Press business newsmaker of the year.
. . .
But despite his success in helping keep the Canadian economy on track, the coming year brings even more challenges for the finance minister as the vast majority of the stimulus spending comes to an end and he faces the task of balancing the budget to meet his target of 2015-16."

"steady hand at the tiller" & "But despite his success in helping keep the Canadian economy on track," are euphemisms for not doing anything.

"“And certainly the infrastructure program, as well as various tax cuts in hindsight, look like they have been very successful in terms of helping to sustain the recovery.” "helping to sustain the recovery."[ Paul Ferley, assistant chief economist at the Royal Bank] - is, again, a euphemism for not having done something to destroy the recovery.

So too, "But despite his success in helping keep the Canadian economy on track,"

“Canada has an excellent reputation for its fiscal performance internationally and I want to maintain that,” Mr. Flaherty said.
Again, "maintain" means to keep it as it is and not to do anything the destroy it.


“In 2010, it became clear that Canada had emerged from the deepest worldwide economic crisis since the 1930s in relatively good shape,” Mr. Flaherty said.

There is no claim here by Flaherty, and rightfully (morally) so, that Canada's performance was due to anything Flaherty or Harper did (Flaherty tried the 'Right' thing for a while - to claim responsibility in Con partisan uber-hype but had to back down after countless times being put in the embarrassing position of being confronted with the realities).

And this is for good reason.

The recession was caused by factors external to Canada. The recovery from recession, once again is external to Canada.

Canada has been able to survive so far because of two factors:

the excellent shape of the economy that that Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin built up over 10 years, which was inherited by Harper and Flaherty;

and,

the exceptional strength of the Canadian banks, which, once again was the direct efforts of the Liberal Party over ten years.

In a nut shell:

What this article is referring to is that the as long as Harper and Flaherty left things alone and didn't destroy what took a generation of Liberal efforts to build Canada would be able to survive the recession, even the fiscal policies Harper & Flaherty brought in, not the least of which was the very negative reduction in GST, were enough to undermine Canada's fiscal and banking strength that are the legacy of the Liberal government. (Perhaps this is the Harper strategy - introduce some hair-brained, yahoo, one-off, extreme Con policies that, albeit harms Canada's fiscal strength are not enough to sink it, and basically maintain things as they found them, then point to these one-off's and say that's the reason everything turned out ok. Now that's a Con-con!)

For this Flaherty takes credit, without any acknowledgment whatsoever for those truly responsible - to the winner go the spoils.

On the other hand, perhaps Flaherty and Harper should be given some credit for not bringing in the full spectrum of Con policies which even he and Harper could see would have smashed Canada against the reefs of unregulated, unmitigated laisse-faire, cut-throat capitalism, as happened with so many other countries in this recession.

excerpt: Lloyd MacILquham cicblog.com/comments.html