Harper's economic "stability"

Jim Stanford, Progress Economics:

So how do you like economic stability so far?

In the first week of stability-inducing majority government, Canada’s economy experienced:

- A decline of almost 400 points over the week in the TSX composite, the worst weekly loss all year.

- A decline of almost 2 U.S. cents in the value of the loonie.

- Turmoil in commodity and futures markets, sparked in part by new U.K. rules limiting speculative positions in the silver market. The resulting downturn spread to other commodity prices (including oil) which had also been bid up by speculators.

- A miserable GDP report (issued the Friday before the election) showing that Canada’s real output was actually declining in February, casting doubt on the viability of the recovery.

- A jobs report issued this Friday that had a positive headline number (58,000 more Canadians working in April), but was gloomy in the details. 70 percent of those jobs were part-time, and almost two-thirds were in the public sector – many of them at Elections Canada working on an election that Mr. Harper said all along was “unnecessary” and economically damaging. In the goods-producing side of the economy, employment was falling (largely reflecting the impact of a sky-high loonie on manufacturing).

Canada suffered a serious economic downturn under Harper’s government, millions of Canadians continue to experience hardship and insecurity, per capita GDP and hourly productivity are still lower than when he was elected in 2006, and Canada’s economic performance since the financial crisis has been middling at best compared to the broad sample of industrialized countries. Yet the Conservatives, with vague appeals to “prudence” and “good management” (backed by important, vocal support from business and the private media) played the economic card effectively in this campaign. Some day we will adequately educate Canadians about how our economy really works, and the Conservatives will lose their “free pass” on economic credibility.

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