[starseed]

The way I look at it, I think the Liberals have a good approach to federal debt. They were the party that took the federal debt from approaching 70% of GDP after Mulroney, to less than 40% by the time the sponsorship scandal and attitude toward the electorate brought them down. That progress stalled when the conservatives took over, then reversed a little bit because of the great recession.

If our federal debt is ~$613B, and GDP is ~$1812B, then to maintain our decent federal debt to GDP ratio, we can have a federal deficit of over $6B per year with 1% growth. The IMF is projecting 1% growth for 2015, and 1.7% for 2016... which would permit $10.4B in deficit spending without changing the debt to GDP ratio.

With growth so low, we should support the low tax, high investment plan the Liberals have put forward. The real debt problem exists in the areas that people like Nenshi are trying to get us to look at. We are falling further behind on Provincial, municipal, and infrastructure debt. Trudeau is promoting the better plan to address this and invest in long-term GDP growth.

The Liberal platform has their target of gradually reducing the federal debt to GDP ratio from the low 30s to 27% by 2019, all while lowering middle class taxes and keeping the very competitive corporate tax rate alone.

So really, the debt issue should not be the biggest factor in this election. It should be between ideologically driven policies of investing billions in items like mega prisons while crime rates have been on the deline, or economist and SME driven policies like investing in infrastructure.