New evidence suggests the government should pay attention to evidence

In a pomopolist world, policy initiatives will be informed by evidence, consultation, and reasoned analysis.

When politicians base policy decisions on short-term political gain, on the other hand, they tend to create a big ol' mess down the road.

To wit: back in March, former Harper chief of staff Ian Brodie dropped a few jaws at a McGill conference on public policy - during a panel on evidence in policy-making, no less - by frankly admitting that while Conservatives knew GST cut was bad economics (as countless economists lined up to tell them), they also knew that voters didn't know that, or care. What's more, they were sure that voters were tired of hearing from all these egghead-economist-academic-types-who-don't-understand-real-canadians anyway. 

“Despite economic evidence to the contrary, in my view the GST cut worked,” Brodie said. “It worked in the sense that by the end of the ’05-’06 campaign, voters identified the Conservative party as the party of lower taxes. It worked in the sense that it helped us to win.”

Swell.

As it turns out, one of those pesky economists has amassed a whole bunch of that pesky evidence to demonstrate why Canada's deficit has become a structural one (as opposed to temporary one due only to the stimulus spending). His conclusion? Our structural (read permanent unless something changes) deficit mirrors exactly the lost revenue from the GST cut.

Read all about it here: http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2009/11/structural-deficit.html#more

But hey - as Ian says, it helped them win.

That it plunged our country into the red for the forseeable future, I suppose, is just an inconvenient side effect of scoring some far more important political points.

This was bad policy. And they knew it. And they did it anyway. And now we're screwed.

Real swell.