i think krugman is actually giving him too much credit.
my bet is that the infrastructure plan reduces to a tweet to ask investors to invest more in infrastructure, maybe followed by another tweet calling paul ryan some mean names for supposedly blocking it.
there's actually precedence for this: whenever obama was faced with doing anything complicated, he wrote a speech explaining that congress should do it.
the primary reason that i endorsed justin trudeau was also for stimulus spending, and specifically an idea he floated in his platform around a "green infrastructure bank". that's a far better idea than a carbon tax...
the economy in the country is such that we can't reasonably expect that anybody is going to shut down the oil industry on a dime, especially not after the previous government, which operated loosely like a petro-state. we spent nine years of increasing integration with the oil economy. and, that just made it harder to disengage.
so, trudeau is going to support pipelines. he has to. and, we're going to have to stop them using direct action and court orders.
but, what trudeau can do is set the ball in motion around a larger systemic change by setting up a financial industry around the green sector. and, yes you have to do it like this. i'm not an advocate of historical materialism, but the ideas floated by naomi klein and others are getting the causality backwards - you need capital investment first, and then a worker's movement. marx understood that.
and, so trudeau can play a very important facilitative role, here. given that we exist in the existing neo-liberal order, what he's floating is really a pre-requisite for a serious economic shift to renewables. that's why i endorsed him. well, that and the pot...
he's been taking some steps in this direction, and the media is trying to change the topic by pointing out that he's floating the bank as a public-private investment. you can make the argument that this is exactly the same error that his father made in shifting to more private borrowing, which some people pinpoint as the source of our debt problems in the 80s. and, you'd be right to argue this was an error - but you'd be wrong to argue this was trudeau's error. the error came out of an international agreement around the dismantlement of bretton woods. canada would have faced penalties had it ignored it. rather than point to trudeau's implementation as an error, one should look at his incomplete implementation as a partial victory. the reasons we didn't get nailed on the housing collapse ultimately stem back to trudeau pushing back, however carefully, on this international consensus, as it developed in the early 70s. and he had to be careful, too. extremely careful. he had both the brits and the americans lined up against him.
the idea that the private-public partnership is being compared against, that is a new infrastructure bank set up as a subsidiary of the bank of canada, is certainly a superior one in the eyes of this commentator. that would allow the country to arbitrarily print money for infrastructure. there is some misinformation floating around on this point that seems to ultimately stem from paul hellyer; canada never printed all of it's money debt-free. but, it certainly had a higher percentage of it printed debt-free, in the past. and, this did keep our debt down. but, while superior, this idea is also illegal under our international trade agreements. justin has little choice but to compromise, as his father did in the 70s.
we need a thought experiment, here. but, this experiment is also very real - it happened recently in ontario, and many of trudeau's closest advisers lived it first hand. let's say that trudeau sets up the green bank and uses it to subsidize local technology companies. what that does is open up the government to legal action under the wto, under nafta, under the tpp (should it come into force....) and under the ceta, too, for "anti-competitive investment practices". we would never win such a case. rather, these agreements were designed partially to prevent public investment strategies. we would have to shut the bank down and pay out exorbitant sums to the entities launching legal action. it can happen here - it already did.
the irony is that many of the people pushing the alarm on the involvement of private investment are also in support of the agreements that necessitate it. this is not nefarious, it is ignorance - which has been the problem the whole time. activists tried to warn people that these agreements would tie the hands of government, years down the road. this reality is upon us, and the media still refuses to see it.
i would rather see a subsidiary of the bank of canada, as was promised. but, i knew at the time that such a subsidiary would require leaving the wto, first. i held out hope for the latter, but expected that private money would be involved in the long run - either immediately or through eventual privatization. but if you want public funding of infrastructure, as i do, then let's get the steps in order: we'll have to get out of the wto, first. oops? no. we told you...
if we want major infrastructure projects right now, this is the only way to do it. it's not ideal. but, i support it.
the effects of the stimulus are not different, if the money is private. and, that's what we need.
debt is ultimately just an abstraction, it's not real. we can deal with that later.
infrastructure is real. and, we needed dramatic spending boosts years ago.
in the long run, if the investors become an annoyance then we can just nationalize. simple.
for right now? take their money. and put it to good use.
it's a path of least resistance. it's smart. and it's why this party works, and this country works - despite being surrounded by a world that is often irrational.