We've seen this movie before: megaprojects were all the rage in the 1980s. Governments spent the 1990s cleaning up the fiscal mess

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I was Saskatchewan’s finance minister during the fiscal crisis of the 1990s, which we successfully weathered. I think the current debate about the sustainability of Canada’s finances would benefit from some lessons from the past.

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First, comparisons of Canada’s current fiscal situation with the 1990s need to go beyond traditional measures like the ratio of debt to gross domestic product (GDP). Today we face major challenges that were not present in the 1990s: the costs of an aging population and the lethal combination of a slow-growth economy being battered by Donald Trump’s tariffs and the major changes to the Canada-United States trading relationship that he has brought.

Secondly, the root causes of the 1990s fiscal crisis went beyond over-spending to include governments’ approaches to economic development. “