I would like to believe Michael Ignatieff when he says he wants to clean up our economic “mess”.  It certainly is a noble goal he has.  Of course Mr. Ignatieff’s economic musings are more about politics than anything else.  Needless to say regardless of your political persuasions saying that you want to clean up an economic mess after what we’ve been through over the last year and a half gets points with me.

Are there differences when it comes to the political manifestations of the Liberals and the Conservatives?  I think so but then again don’t think too hard about it.  Sometimes when Liberals get in power they act like Conservatives and who would’ve ever imagined an old reformer like Stephen Harper would preside over a federal budget deficit near 56 billion dollars.  So let’s forget politics for the time being.  Our political leaders regardless of affiliation will ultimately act the same when it comes to our economic redemption.

Having said that I have thought more than once over the past week about economic recovery and where we are right about now.  As many of you know we have just passed the Lehman Brothers first anniversary so the past week has been full of media reflection on what happened and how we got there.  It is almost like journalists are grasping at straws for some type of economic recovery.  I find myself doing the same thing because simply put it’s always a nice place to go.

If I could put a question mark on this economic recovery it would be about what former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said was jobs, jobs, jobs!  The unemployment rate in Canada is at 8.7% but we all know here in southwestern Ontario its much higher.  For instance in Chatham Kent hits 13.75% and London and Windsor are in the same ballpark.  So even though Canada is starting back on a path of positive economic growth we are not seeing it in Southwestern Ontario.  It leads me to think one of two things.  Either we are in a region of the country which has become chronic for unemployment or the stimulus spending our government has employed has not yet created the jobs to get people working again.

It is certainly an unbalanced recovery across Canada.  For instance in August private employers in Canada actually hired more people than they fired for the first time since September 2008.  That has led many people to believe that we have decoupled from the effects of the US recession.  In the United States the unemployment rate has risen to 9.7% and the Obama administration may be bracing for a lot higher than that.

So the question I have is should we just get used to it and maybe put our blind faith in somebody like Michael Ignatieff or Stephen Harper for that matter to see what they could do.  For instance regardless of economic recovery that is going on now in Canada according to our Prime Minister its still very fragile.  At the same time in other countries like Germany their central bank has said that they will not reach the same level of prosperity that they enjoyed in 2008 until 2013.  So that tells me even in a period of technical “economic recovery “the road back to full employment will seemingly take forever.

For our political leaders when they are alone in a room devoid of political reality the economic problems must seem a puzzle.  For instance Stephen Harper is about the same age as me.  That would mean if he had borrowed any money in the early 1980s he may have had a mortgage rate at over 20% interest.  Now we have the lowest interest rates in Canadian history.  So how bad is that if you’re borrowing a lot of money trying to stimulate the economy?  Needless to say the cost of borrowing is about as cheap as it will ever be.  So if any politician has ideas about printing money and paying back this debt with cheaper dollars, think again. Nobody wants the inflation genie to come out of the bottle because if it does one of the only ways of killing it is to raise interest rates substantially from where they are now.

When Lehman Brothers went bust last year I think you know how I felt.  Read last week’s column. At the time I said we might see some economic recovery in the middle of 2010.  So as we look ahead predicting our economic future needs to be measured with cautious tones.  Michael Ignatieff might be right that he can clean everything up.  He might see something I don’t or he might believe that something might come out of left field to stimulate the economy more. If he gets his chance of governing, I’ll be watching.