Those heartless Tories, in full

The chart above (click to enlarge) traces the history of federal program spending over the last four-and-a-half decades. The numbers shown have been adjusted to take account of inflation (ie they are in constant 2006 dollars) and population growth (ie these are per capita figures). In other words, they show the number of real dollars the government spent on each citizen, the best comparative indicator of the size of government over the years.

You can see the rapid buildup in spending in the late 1960s and early 1970s, followed by the Trudeau government's first attempts to rein it in in the late 1970s, only to be blown skyhigh by the recession of the early 1980s. Then the long holding action of the Mulroney years, the sharp cuts of the late 1990s, and the equally sharp rebound in the current decade, to its present near-record levels.

And the future? The chart builds in the latest numbers from the Economic and Fiscal Update. They show the Harper government plans to take spending to places it has never been -- higher than the Trudeau Liberals in the worst of the recession, higher than the Mulroney government in its last, desperate days, higher than the Martin government at its most profligate. They are going to spend more, faster than any government in Canadian history, with neither war nor recession to blame.

These are the flinty "neo-conservatives" we've been reading so much about: the ones who want to take government back to the 1930s, the ones who would steer the country in a "radically different direction", who see no useful role for the state, and so on. Uh huh. Can you imagine how much they'd spend if they did believe in government?

UPDATE: Just for fun, I've redone the chart as it would look if spending were held to a 0.9% rate of growth over the next five years, as Mike Harris and Preston Manning recommend in their recent paper. As the chart shows, this would result in real per capita spending being cut all the way back to the dark days of ... 2004.