Beware the deficit hawks

First, a little context.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been doing daily, two-hour-plus public addresses from the official residence, all of which have been posted in full on YouTube by CBC News, since the COVID-19 crisis started. Most of those updates have included three different elements:

1. Updates on the progress of the COVID-19 fight itself, and the measures being taken to combat the virus and keep Canadians safe;
2. Updates on the spending measures that the Canadian government (a minority government, currently, since Trudeau's Liberals won the election but not a majority of the seats on Parliament) have managed to enact, or are planning to enact, so help cushion the economic blow for Canadians who have been mostly stuck at home due to social distancing measures necessary to fight COVID-19; and
   
3. a Q & A session, mostly composed of inane questions from reporters who are basically prompting Trudeau to repeat points from 1 and 2, with the occasional break to field a question about some other news item of the day.

The official opposition Conservative party, who currently have a lame duck leader who's officially resigned and is just keeping the seat warm until his party is able to pick a replacement for him, have been in the weird position of attempting to make political hay off the one thing that almost everyone agrees isn't really a political issue, i.e. the govenment's attempts to respond to an unprecedented global pandemic. Mostly, that's put them in the position of arguing that the Liberals (who are in the minority, remember, and thus can't approve new spending unless as least one of Canada's opposition parties goes along) aren't spending enough to help Canadians... specifically, to help giant corporations, the oil industry, and farmers, all key Conservative constituencies.

But that was then, and this is apparently now, and Conservative media sock-puppets have apparently decided that it's time to pivot to their perennial hobby-horse: spending cuts. Yes, with the pandemic still raging, the economy still mostly shut down, and really no way to effectively predict what the future holds in terms of economic recovery, and therefore the govenment revenue which depends on it, they're now pressing for the Prime Minister to give iron-clad, binding predictions of exactly how much the pandemic response will cost, exactly how long it will take to pay that cost off, and exactly how he intends to raise the required revenue.

Yes, really.

And I can't help but agree with the visibly nonplussed Trudeau on this one. The pandemic isn't fucking over yet. We have no idea what the costs of fighting it will be, when the economy will be able to fully reopen, or how long it will take government revenues to recover afterwards, and thus absolutely no fucking way to make anything like realistic predictions of any kind about any of those things. The fuckwad in the linked video clip, though, stridently demanded all three of those things, right now, and attempted to belittle the P.M. for not providing them.

So, in case you were wondering, the right-wing agenda of massive corporate giveaways, massive tax cuts for the rich, and massive economic pain for the average Canadian who will have to pay for both of those, has remained intact in spite of an unprecendented global pandemic. The entire right wing platform will be "got ours, fuck you," just like it's been for decades, and they're being at all coy about telegraphing that with the fucking pandemic still raging.

To be clear, they're pushing this fatuous nonsense at a time when most Canadians truly could not care less about the fucking deficit, and when most serious economists are talking about the need to implement some form of universal basic income as the best way out of the economic mess that COVID-19 has made worldwide. They're pushing this same bullshit because they have neither imaginations, nor shame.

Canadians, do not be fooled.

When the time comes to vote in the next govenment, when one side can't shut up about the deficit, while the other is talking about actual solutions to the problems of wealth inequity, poverty, and an economy that's still struggling to recover from COVID-19, remember that austerity has never worked in anyone's favour except for the wealthiest among us, who really don't need the help, and that one side of that debate has been talking the whole time about what Canadians actually need to preserve their lives and livelihoods. And then vote Liberal.