No one, it seems, likes Brian Mulroney. But like him or not, some of his Tory government’s policies are working. Fiscal responsibility, for example, has been one of the government’s strongest suits and recent figures tend to back that up. The government’s operating balance — how much money it takes in minus the money it spends other than interest payments — showed a surplus of $9.9 billion in 1989-90. The year the Tories first took office, 1984-85, the operating balance showed a deficit of $15.9 billion.
That’s a turnaround of almost $26 billion. Were it not for the huge debt built up by previous governments, the interest on which the government spends almost one-third of its revenue, we would be living within our means and better able to face the current recession.
That total debt, by the way, now stands at something like $350 billion. According to The Fiscal Monitor, published by the federal finance department, 80% of that debt is attributable to interest payments on the debt that had accumulated by the end of 1984-85.
Imagine how big that debt might have been if Mulroney’s opponents had been put in charge of the purse strings.
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