Canada

There are still rumours in Westminster that David Cameron will cut taxes to stimulate the economy, but the speech he gave to the Canadian parliament on Thursday rather scotches this idea. Here’s what jumped out at me 1) No Obama-style deficit-financed tax cuts, please, we’re British. “The economic situation is much more dangerous and the solution for most countries can not be simply to borrow more. Because if the government doesn’t have the room to borrow more in order to cut taxes or increase spending, people and markets start worrying about whether a government can actually pay back its debt. And when this happens confidence ebbs away and interest rates

The votes have been counted, and the results of the Canadian federal election are in. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives Stephen Harper’s Conservatives performed much more strongly than many expected, securing their first majority since 1993 by 13 seats. The New Democratic Party’s vote did indeed hold up: they took 31 per cent of the vote (almost exactly as the latest polls predicted), and won 102 seats, beating the Liberals by a wide margin to become the official opposition. The Liberals had their worst election result in their 144-year history, returning fewer than half the MPs they had going into the election. The Bloc Québécois had a disastrous night too, also suffering

Today Canadians go to the polls for their fourth general election in seven years, after Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government fell to an unprecedented motion citing it for contempt of Parliament. The story of the campaign has undoubtedly been the meteoric rise of Jack Layton’s New Democratic Party. Until now, the centre-left NDP had been the third party nationally — and, in fact, fourth in number of seats, due to the regional strength of the Bloc Québécois. However, they have enjoyed a steady surge over the past three weeks, with the election-eve polls putting them on about 31 per cent — more than 10 points ahead of the previously second-placed

Jean Chrétien, the former Canadian prime minister, has acquired an almost mythic status in certain Tory circles for the way his government cut back public spending in the 1990s. So it’s worth paying attention to his remarks about ringfencing departmental budgets last night. He didn’t quite go so far as to say that withholding the axe would fatally undermine George Osborne’s deficit reduction plan, but he did suggest that it would make the politics of the situation a good deal tricker: “Jean Chrétien, whose tough fiscal tightening programme in the 1990s is seen by the Government as a model for Britain today, warned that everyone always came up with plausible

Why does Britain fall for financial spin so often? The question goes well beyond the great confidence trick of Gordon Brown’s ten years in the Treasury. I’m just back from three weeks in Australia. What’s always struck me in the years I’ve gone there is how different the newspapers/news shows/political debates are. They are well informed about macro-economics, and there is much less of the spin/personality culture of the mainstream media in the UK. Canada is exactly the same. Last week, the Canadian budget was published – a very clear and credible path to getting budget back to balance within three years. One of their officials explained to me that

If the government wants to stem the haemorrhaging of elite support for NATO’s Afghan mission, there is one major thing it can do at this stage: establish a British version of the Manley Commission. In Canada, ex-Deputy Prime Minister John Manley was asked by the Harper government to take a hard look at Canada’s role is Afghansistan, and lay out a clear plan. Its work effectively rebuilt Canadian support for the war effort. The Brown Government is simply not trusted to give an honest assessment of what is happening on the ground or give the military what it needs. The Defence Secretary is an unknown entity outside of Westminster (and