"Never again will we allow the spectre of overspending to haunt this land," then Finance Minister Paul Martin said 1998. "Canadians have paid to see the movie ‘The Deficit'. They don't want to pay to see the sequel." Now, just over a decade later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is bracing Canadians to watch that sequel. It's a remarkable turn for Harper who has fought against deficits and in favour of balanced budgets his entire political life. Indeed, he and other former Progressive Conservatives left the the party of Brian Mulroney in the early 1990s partly because of their disgust in his inability to rein in government spending and tackle the deficit . . .

"In terms of the education job, I think we've done a good job at educating the public to the view that deficits are generally bad," Stephen Harper said Sunday. "We now may be in a period where we have to educate the public to a somewhat less simplistic view. There are occasions where deficits are not only not necessarily bad, they are essential."