Liberals criticize projected Tory spending
Last Updated: Sunday, January 8, 2006 | 10:31 PM ET
CBC News
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper's promises made to date will produce a deficit "of at least $12.4 billion over five years," the Liberal campaign said in an analysis of Tory fiscal plans.
The Conservatives have not yet revealed their entire fiscal platform, but on Sunday released a letter from the Conference Board of Canada which says they will not run a deficit.
The board "was given access to the entire Conservative platform in order to conduct its analysis," a Conservative release said.
The Liberal analysis assumes an annual $3 billion contingency reserve will continue. The reserve, set aside for special situations, is usually not spent and used to reduce the national debt.
But even based on the Liberal numbers, there would be no Conservative deficit if the reserve was used to pay for Tory promises.
The Liberals said the figures they calculated exclude the cost of the Conservative promise to address the "fiscal imbalance" by giving more money to the provinces, which would further increase the deficit.
A Conservative government would have to "make the same choices that other right-of-centre governments have made: either rack up huge deficits or slash programs to realize the core conservative vision of a much smaller, weaker government," the Liberal release said.
On Friday, the Conservatives said their promised tax cuts will be larger than Liberal cuts, but also said details of their entire fiscal platform have not yet been released.
In saying the Conservatives would not run a deficit, Maheux cited the projected $55 billion federal surplus over the next five years, the same figure the federal government used in its November 2005 economic update.
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