Lorne Gunter: Some voters mistakenly ‘wishcasting’ desires on Mark Carney’s Liberals

I learned a new word over the weekend — “wishcasting.” It’s when people project what they want to believe onto an organization or leader, even if it isn’t true.

If the polls on issues such as economic growth, national unity, lower taxes, reduced government spending and less crime is to be believed, voters from Ontario eastward are wishcasting their desired policies onto Mark Carney and the Liberals.

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How else would you explain the Liberals’ lead in voting-intention polls when Carney’s policies would continue the disastrous outcomes Canada has suffered under the Liberals over the past 10 years?

The Liberals are the last party anyone should pick who wants national unity, a balanced budget, a smaller bureaucracy, lower taxes, lower inflation and less crime. Yet central Canadian and Atlantic Canadian voters favour the Liberals on all those issues. That’s wishcasting.

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For one thing, all the Liberals know how to do is spend money. And given their track record of the past decade, the increased spending outlined in their platform would amount merely to throwing good money after bad.

Comparing Carney’s election platform, released on the weekend, to Justin Trudeau’s last budget, a Carney government would go even deeper into debt than Trudeau had intended.

Trudeau would have added $131 billion to the national debt over the next four years, according to the last Liberal budget update. Meanwhile, the Carney Liberals intend to increase that figure to $225 billion. That’s on top of the $600 billion in debt the Trudeau government added to our national total in its decade in office.

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The Carney Liberals intend to run annual deficits of more than $56 billion every year, on average, each year for the next four.

Fifty-five per cent of Canadians claim to want the federal government to spend less money. The Liberals have no intention of doing so, yet voters east of the Manitoba-Ontario border say they trust them more than the Conservatives to get spending under control. That’s more “wishcasting.”

Carney still claims his party will balance the budget over the next three years. So how can he say that if he’s prepared to run deficits of nearly $60 billion in perpetuity?

Carney intends to split the federal budget in two — operating and capital. It’s the operating budget he intends to balance while ramping up capital spending (spending on transportation corridors and “green” projects, for instance) to levels never before seen in Canada, not even during wartime.

If you listen to Carney carefully, you’ll see it is only the operating budget he intends to balance. He will treat the capital budget as an investment — one he insists will return to Canadians $500 billion in extra economic activity.

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Sure, sure. In much the same way Liberals have been promising for two decades that investments in “green” technologies will painlessly replace oil and natural gas in our daily lives, our economy and job creation.

Separating operating and capital budgets is the three-card monte of bookkeeping. Now you see an expense, now you don’t, because the government moved it from one budget to the other and reclassified it.

This is the same made-up budgeting process employed by Alison Redford and her PC government in Alberta in the early 2010s. It didn’t work here, either. At the end of the day, the government’s lenders still want all the money paid back, whether it is used for capital or operations.

The Liberal platform is rooted in the fallacy that Canada can spend its way to prosperity on economic growth, trade policy and the cost of living — a method that has been tried by plenty of governments in the Western world without success. Ever.

Yet it appears because voters in central and Eastern Canada won’t hold the Liberals to account for their lost decade, all Canadians are once again to be saddled with another term of the same high-spending incompetence.

It’s beyond baffling.

lgunter@postmedia.com

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