Remember the good old 1990s sluggish Canadian economic growth, high unemployment, and one of the developed world’s worst records for productivity improvement by some measure the worst record.

While the United States and much of the rest of the world boomed, Canada’s standard of living slipped back compared to other nations, and not just in relation to the United States. It was a decade of lost opportunity.

The great danger is that Canada is being set up for another economic disaster in a couple decades. All the signs suggest that Ottawa is getting ready to open the floodgates for a new torrent of spending that could quickly re-create the debt problem Canadians struggled through in the 1990s.

After a couple years of surplus, many Canadians and apparently much of the federal brain trust believe the debt and deficit problem has gone away. The thinking seems to be if we can increase spending and get more money out of the taxpayer, let’s do it.

With the debt problem out of the way (or so it thinks) Ottawa wants to splurge. The difficulty with this is that the debt problem has emphatically not disappeared.

Just last year, the federal government spent over $40 billion on debt charges, 22 per cent of all federal expenditures. In other words, more than one out of every five bucks Ottawa spent was eaten up by debt charges. The size of the debt remains huge. It exceeds half a trillion dollars and is equal to half of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Beside this monster, Canada’s fiscal surpluses look minute, and the surplus is about to start getting smaller, even without any new spending. Because of the economic downturn, this year’s surplus will be razor thin, that is, if there is a surplus. A balanced budget is already at risk. This is hardly the time for government to start spending like a drunken sailor.

The debt situation is even more worrisome when the debts of all levels of government local, provincial and federal are examined. That debt equals more than three-quarters of our GDP.

Overall government spending also remains very high, about 40 per cent of our GDP. Government takes two out of every five dollars that Canadians earn.

Yet, Ottawa is already talking about an ambitious new spending agenda more money for medicare, a slew of infrastructure and other legacy projects, big bucks for cities, perhaps a new day care program, and large increases in social programs.

Much noise will be made about combating poverty through big social programs, but if government spending could end poverty, Canada would have been rid of it a long time ago.

The best cure for poverty, the best social program, is a job. Yet, nothing is more effective at destroying jobs than the high taxes that accompany big spending programs. Things get worse if high taxes are combined with large deficits and a growing debt.

A big debt sucks money out of the economy in debt charges. Moreover, debt may lead to another round of tax increases down the road as the government struggles to gets its books back under control Those problems afflicted the Canadian economy through 1990s. The debt battle has hardly been won, even as Ottawa seems set to declare victory.

Thus, in the name of combating poverty, Ottawa seems ready to set out on a tax-and-deficit course that will damage the only thing that truly reduces poverty job growth.

Instead of looking for ways to increase government spending, Ottawa should be seeking wasteful spending to cut. That would enable the nation to remain on its debt-cutting trajectory. All sorts of silly government programs remain in place, including those old corporate welfare programs, where Ottawa throws our tax dollars at rich corporations in the name of economic development

Let’s cut spending rather than boost it. The best legacy any government can leave the nation is a set of sound financial ledgers. The worst legacy is a pile of debt left over for the next generation to pay off.