Grading the Tories' economic performance

There was an interesting article in today's Report on Business - the Globe and Mail's financial section, which I usually just skim - which grades the economic performance of Stephen Harper's Tory government against various benchmarks, in an attempt to clarify whether Mr. Harper is in fact justified in campaigning on his good economic record. Not so much, as it turns out.
First, the Tories' economic performance was compared to that of their predecessors. A GDP increase of about 1.6% a year under the Tories pales into insignificance against the 2.9% a year under the Liberal government of Paul Martin, the 3.5% a year under Jean Chrétien's Liberals, and even the 2.3% under the last Conservative government, that of Brian Mulroney.
Anticipating cries of foul on the grounds that the worldwide recession during the Tories' latest tenure skews the figures, Canada was then compared to other developed countries during the same period. Here, things look slightly rosier (although of course it can be argued that Canada weathered the recession better due to the strong financial system developed under the preceding Liberal administration...), but far from definitive. Canadian GDP growth averaged 1.9% per year in the ten years from 2005-2014, slightly more than the 1.6% for the USA, 1.3% for Germany, 1.2% for the UK, etc, but substantially less than Australia's 2.8%, Brazil's 3.4% or China's 10% (these figures are directly from the World Bank's website, and not the Globe article, which did not go into this kind of detail). According to OECD data, the Canadian unemployment rate, currently at 7%, is better than countries like France (10%) and Italy (13%), but worse than the US (6%), Britain (6%), Australia (6%), Germany (5%) and Japan (4%). Overall, the Globe suggests a tie for this section.
As Mr. Harper repeats ad nauseam in his election speeches, his government has indeed added over a million new jobs (about 772,000 of them in his last 4 year term). What he tends to gloss over is: that most of this occurred in the first two years (as Canada laboriously dragged itself out of recesssion); that this is actually an unspectacular performance (a third of the rate of the USA recent rate of job creation); that the country's employment rate (taking into account population growth) is no better than it was during the recesssion years back in 2009; that about one-third of the job creation has occurred in Harper's pet province of Alberta, in the now apparently moribund oil sector; and that the vast majority of the new jobs have come in the lower-paying services sector and not in the higher-earning goods-producing sectors. Thus, a simple statistic can hide a wealth of not-so-rosy detail. (These last figures are from a later Globe and Mail article).
And finally, we need to consider whether the Conservatives' economic record stand up to their own claims and priorities (namely, smaller government, a balanced budget, lower debt and lower taxes). Royal Bank figures on government expenses as a percentage of GDP show them averaging around 13.5% during the last ten years under the Tories (and peaking as high as 15.8%), compared to an average of 12.9% (peaking at 15.7%) in the previous ten years of Liberal rule - a very similar, even slightly inferior, picture. The debt-to-GDP ratio is currently around 32% under the Conservatives, very similar to the 34% before Harper came to power in 2005. The last 7 Conservative budgets up until 2014 were deficits, peaking at $55 billion in 2008, and, although they are desperately trying to bring in this year's on budget, events (mainly the price of oil) are conspiring against them once more. All in all, not a sterling performance on a key element of their platform. As for taxation, courtesy of the reductions in GST and personal tax rates, yes they have reduced the overall level of taxation from about 16% of GDP to 14% (of course, whether or not this is a "good thing" depends on your politics).
In addition to all this, Canada's huge communications, media and manufacturing union UNIFOR recently published their own detailed analysis of Stephen Harper's performance as compared to the eight previous Canadian governments since the Second World War. Looking at sixteen different economic indicators like job creation, economic growth, living standards, exports, government debt and personal income (although admittedly ignoring a few other metrics on which Mr. Harper would perhaps have fared better, like household wealth, tax burden,  etc), the report concludes that the Harper government ranks dead last overall, showing at the bottom of the list in 7 of the 16 metrics and second last in 6 more. Not a pretty sight for Mr. Harper.
In conclusion, although the Conservatives under Stephen Harper have been able to take advantage of high oil and commodity prices until very recently, their record on growth, unemployment, budgets and debt is far from exemplary. If we also consider things like spiralling house prices and household debt, things look even worse. Final grade? Maybe a C+.
Of course, none of this stopped Harper from peppering the first election leaders' debate with his usual blanket claims that Canada has had the strongest economic growth and job creation figures in the world under his watch, despite the evidence to the contrary. But then, that's politics, eh...