Paul Wells often makes the point – in his book, and more recently here – that one of Stephen Harper's long-term goals is to reduce the size of the federal government. I don't think that there's much doubt that this is a goal of the Conservative government. What's much less clear is whether or not this goal has had much of an effect on the trends set in place by Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.

The final number for the fiscal year 2007-2008 were released today, so I'm going to update the last two graphs from my post A brief history of the federal budget surplus. There are many ways or looking at these numbers; I'm going to use two. First up is real (deflated by the CPI), per-capita program spending and tax revenues:


Another way of looking at the question is in terms of GDP shares:


My first impression from looking at these graphs is that Harper is carrying out pretty much the same strategy as his predecessors:

• As a share of GDP, revenues have been gradually falling for almost 10 years, albeit at a more measured pace since 2001. But since GDP has been growing over this time, revenues have been able to sustain an upward trend.
• As a share of GDP, program expenditures have been growing since 1999.

At some point, these trends will produce chronic deficits, so this won't go on for much longer. And it's probably a good bet that the Conservatives will deal with the issue by cutting spending, not by increasing taxes. Then again, it's also a pretty good bet that that Chrétien's or Martin would have done the same thing; take a look at how they dealt with the deficit in the 1990's.

So it looks as though we're going to end up with a federal government that is about the same size as it was in the mid-60's. Stephen Harper may well be pleased with the prospect, and all he really has to do to get there is follow the path set out by his Liberal predecessors.