Last month I was complaining that Canada never appears on the front page of UK newspapers. (My blog post: Canada – closer than you think)

Now, Canada is everywhere. Daily Telegraph. Guardian. The Times.

Everyone wants to know if the Canadian experience of cutting its ballooning deficit in the 1990s is transferable to the UK today.

The Times-on-line reports that Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, has told Cameron “the Canadians put off their budget tightening for too long.”

Cameron says this underlines the point that “we need to get on with what needs to be done.”

Just pause for a moment…

It is as well to remember that Harper runs a minority Conservative Government.

The deficit reduction programme in the mid 1990s was carried through by a majority Liberal Government.

Canadian participants at the Canada-UK Colloquium on the global economic crisis, held in London’s Canary Wharf last December, “warned of the difficulty a minority government could have in pushing through an ambitious deficit reduction programme”.

You bet.

Certainly the huge UK deficit cannot be ignored or wished away.

The PM estimates that UK debt interest repayments could top a staggering £70 billion

This crippling burden is, of course, the product of the near death experience of global capitalism where private sector banks had to be bailed out by the taxpayer. So, as the Conservative Liberal coalition prepares to swing the axe, let us not forget that core fact.

Last December, the Commons Public Administration Select Committee held a session on the coming fiscal squeeze.

We looked at the Canada v Sweden deficit reduction models.

The Committee’s chair, Tony Wright, summed it up this way: “Canada, big targeted strategic cuts, certain bits of government taking the big hits; Sweden, everybody takes a hit across the board.”

While we agonise about the deep cuts the coalition has in store for us, spare a thought for the Americans, crushed under the weight of their multi-trillion dollar deficit.

Curiously, despite this, investors still pour money into US Treasury Bonds on the grounds that a catastrophic economic and financial collapse in the United States is unthinkable.

Indeed.

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See Canada Colloquium (p22 on)

“Despite deficit investors still pour money into US Treasury Bonds”. See The Washington Post