To stimulate or not to stimulate?

The rhetoric out of the coalition camp makes it seem as though every other major economy is injecting billions of dollars into their economies. Not so. For good or ill, Germany is also showing fiscal restraint during the global downturn.

Of course, it's not exactly true that the Harper government is presiding over a stimulus-free zone. I did a very brief Google search and found a few examples of pre-election spending that would be very much like the stimuli the LPC-NPC will propose (but probably better researched). There are probably more but I don't feel like looking.

• $80 million cheque to help Ford reopen a mothballed engine plant in Windsor which had been making V-6 engines and will now begin manufacturing small, fuel-efficient engines
• another $80 million to help Ford develop an R&D centre in Windsor as a part of a new policy called the Automotive Innovation Fund
• deal that will invest a whoppping $4 billion of federal funds into roads, bridges, and other public infrastructure projects in Quebec

Indeed, federal infrastructure spending is due for a massive increase in 2009. The Conservatives also claim that their planned permanent tax cuts (e.g. corporate rate rollback) are part of the stimulus plan. I don't know whether these expenditures were intended to be part of a "stimulus package". But yes or no, the timing was at least correct.