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There will be a considerable degree of agonizing over the size of the debt and deficit. There shouldn’t be. Trudeau and Freeland are simply following the lesson plan created over the past decade by outfits such as the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Only in the outer rim of social media are these organizations seen as anything other than repositories of mainstream economic thinking.
There is nothing radical about what the federal government is doing, but it is still in the easier phase of the crisis response, where the answers are relatively simple: get money to people as quickly as possible.
The Trudeau government has always been pretty good at that challenge. Its signature economic policy before the crisis was the Canada Child Benefit, a program on which Freeland intends to lean again, pledging $2.4 billion in 2021 for enhanced payments to low- and middle-income families with children less than six years of age.
It’s a reasonable stopgap for families — mostly working mothers — who have been pushed to the limits by this crisis. But what Canada really needs is a massive push to implement a nationwide system of affordable daycare, which study after study shows would pay for itself by boosting the economy’s growth potential.
Freeland made no promises. She said she will be putting her recovery plan together over the winter in time for next year’s budget. The guardrails for that phase of the rescue effort should be “quality” of spending, not “quantity.”
Financial Post
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