Thread by @JimboStanford

It is infuriating how the false narrative that Canada faced a "debt crisis" in the 1990s has been repeated so often by fiscal conservatives, it is now reported as fact--even by platforms that should know better (eg. @CBCNews cbc.ca/news/politics/…). ...2

The phony claim of a looming "debt wall" was invoked to justify the huge retrenchment of EI & other social programs, most dramatically in the 1995 budget, impoverishing hundreds of thousands. The sustained failure of EI ever since is why govt had to invent CERB in this crisis...3

Lo and behold, the fed budget was miraculously balanced just 2 years later (in 1997, years ahead of "schedule"). No debt crisis occurred, or would have. I reviewed this phony history in 2003 for @ccpa, worth reading again to contest this false history policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/… ...4

Both the GFC in 2008-09 & the current pandemic have confirmed national govts can mobilize huge resources to pay for priorities they deem deserving. EI, social transfers to provinces, and other social spending were not deemed worthy, so the govt *chose* to cut them in '95...5

The cuts were not necessitated by a "debt crisis." Rather, they *caused* a crisis: for those who lost essential income supports & services, which could have been maintained via a more balanced deficit-reduction strategy (such as enunciated by the Alternative Federal Budget) ...6

Please stop referring to this important and painful episode in Canadian fiscal & political history as a "debt crisis." It was nothing of the sort; that language merely helps set the stage for a new incarnation of austerity that conservatives want to see, deficit or no deficit.