The British news today has almost unanimously taken part in heralding the Liberal Party of the mid-nineties as the deficit slayers to which the current coalition government aspires. David Cameron is warning that Great Britain is about to radically change in the way that public spending is administered, and is calling for citizens to expect drastic cuts to bring the nation back to balanced deficits.

The “radical plan” will involve importing a “Canadian-style star chamber” in which members of the cabinet will be forced to justify their budgets in front of their own colleagues. This, the British news is reporting, intends to follow the Canadian example of former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who turned around a fiscal deficit of 9.1% of GDP in the mid-1990s and brought in staggering surpluses.

The idea of a star chamber is actually an old English court of law that sat at the royal Palace of Westminster until the year 1641. It consisted of Privy Counsellors and common-law judges, and supplemented the activities of the common-law and equity courts in both civil and criminal matters. Over time it evolved into a political symbol of the misuse and abuse of power. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government revived the star chamber for private ministerial meetings to resolve disputes between the Treasury and out-of-control spending departments.

Before the Brits get too excited about copying the example set by the Chrétien-Martin Liberal Party, however, they should be apprised of a few facts. It’s true that the Liberal Party used a majority mandate to push through reforms of the public service, including some much needed spending cuts of 20% to some departments. There is little doubt that this helped in the expenditures, and reduced the overall outgoing waste.

A huge part of balancing the federal budget was by downloading the costs onto the provinces, who in turn downloaded them onto the municipalities. This led to the massive “fiscal imbalance” between the province of Ontario [primarily with taxes from the city of Toronto] and the federal services received in return.

Paul Martin violated the Canada Health Act, which promises the Federal government shares half of health care costs with the provinces, by changing that commitment to 25%. Since then, the provinces have struggled to balance the needs of their citizens with the burgeoning costs of health care. In British Columbia the costs of health care have risen so sharply that income from the “revenue neutral” HST will be diverted into Health Care for the first year of the tax.

Then there was the gutting of the Canadian military. Despite the fact that as a NATO member nation in the alliance it is recommended that we spend a minimum of 2% on defence, the Liberals reduced this to a mere 1.1%. When they took power in 1993, spending was at 1.82%.

In 1999 the Liberal government “stole” a $30 billion surplus from the federal employee pension fund [including the military], and funneled it into general revenues. And if that weren’t bad enough, Employment Insurance reached a $57 billion surplus by the end of fiscal 2008. But that, too, is empty, because the Liberal Party used it as a slush fund to pay down the public debt.

So if David Cameron truly wants to mimic Canada’s deficit slaying Liberals, he’ll have to cut the public sector, starve the military, “retire” the public sector surplus, and redirect all social security funding to paying down the debt. Simple, right?