Editor:
Justin Trudeau, I'd like to remind you and your cabinet of young and inexperienced ministers that you're repeating history. If forgotten, or unknown, history repeats itself.
But first a lesson in politics: Justin et al, governments are not elected, governments are defeated. Voters did not vote for you, Justin, and the ballooning of your deficits as much as voters cast ballots against Stephen Harper's disdain for science and his ignorance of the environment. We did not catch deficit-mania; we booted Harper et al out.
Protest voting.
True, Justin, that during the election, you and your candidates promised modest deficits to stimulate the economy, but nobody voted without reservation for a Trudeau continuation of the Harper deficits. And voters certainly didn't want you, Justin, to inflate your modest $10 billion-a-year deficits to the levels being projected only 100 and some days after voting your opponent out.
Back to the bit of forgotten history: Jean Chretien was finance minister for your father, Pierre Trudeau. Your dad was known as a deficit spender, too.
Anyway, Chretien was very popular. He was the darling of the media.
He had a great sense of humour. He was invited to co-host national radio shows. And he gave great interviews. He was fun, he was comical. During one of those interviews, a journalist quizzed him about the deficits that he and your father, Pierre, were running: Weren't they worried about the debt they were accumulating?
Chretien's rationale was, Well most of Canada's national debt was then owed to fellow Canadians, so we owed our debt to ourselves, nothing to worry about. Sunny Ways. Spend, spend, spend. To hell with thrift.
And time and deficits flew by the way they do. And your father resigned, and Chretien endured a leadership defeat to John Turner to become Liberal leader and replace the Conservatives' Brian Mulroney. And the deficits that time had turned to debt lurked in wait.
In the end, it didn't matter whether our national debt was owed to fellow Canadians, or the Chinese, or the Americans, or whomever: as prime minister, Chretien and his Liberals had to deal with all that debt that he and your father and Brian Mulroney had piled up. Our country looked like one of the PIGS, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.
Justin, you promised modest deficits, not ballooning ones based on airy-fairy debt-to-GDP ratios. Relearn the lessons your father and Chretien and their contemporaries learned the hard way. Repeating bad history is stupid. We don't want to be one of the PIGS ever again.
Greg J. Edwards
