Gotcha!

Canada's Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and his boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, apparently took quite a grilling on Parliament Hill today following Flaherty's announcement yesterday that the federal deficit would be in the neighbourhood of $50 billion. That's $16 billion more than he predicted four months ago, and a full $50 billion more than his crystal ball told him back in November, when he insisted no deficits were coming. 

When a Finance Minister is that far off - as in, completely off - on his figures, he turns himself into a big, fat target for the Opposition. Sure enough, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has called for Flaherty's job, and he and other members of his party, as well as the New Democrats, have labeled Flaherty as incompetent.

All of this may be true - really, how could any Canadian economic leader stand up six months ago and say there would be no recession in this country - but these criticisms are more than a little dodgy. First off, Flaherty's inability to see into the financial future is an affliction that had been pretty contagious for most of the past few years, a blindness shared by politicians from most nationalities and political stripes. The fact that almost nobody saw it coming is the main reason the recession hit so hard and so quickly.

Secondly, it's a bit rich for the Liberals and New Democrats to paint Harper and Flaherty as incompetent, reckless money wasters when they themselves have lobbied so consistently, and in many cases effectively, for the very spending that's ratcheting the deficit up. The Opposition hasn't been urging the Conservatives to tighten their belts, they've been asking for more spending.

They know this, of course, but they're perfectly okay with the cognitive dissonance. That's what's so disheartening about the current state of political discourse - that the advocates of social spending become Scrooges and the champions of fiscal management turn into free-spenders based on the prevailing winds of political opportunism. Either side is willing to pull an ideological 180 if it they see a chance to serve up a gut punch to their opponents. 

Not that I feel an iota of sympathy for Flaherty and Harper or a Conservative party that has been littering the airwaves with cheap attack ads on Ignatieff. They deserve whatever beating they get. I just wish it was on more honest terms, rather than the result of the tired old political "gotcha" game.