The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, the government's swift rollout of support programs helped the economy through a generational crisis. In a retrospective of Justin Trudeau's nine years as Prime Minister, The Globe's Mark Rendell and Nojoud Al Mallees write that the surge in government borrowing to pay for the emergency pushed the national debt sharply higher, from around $700-billion in 2019 to almost $1.2-trillion by 2022. In hindsight, support programs were too generous and the government was slow to roll them back. When inflation took off in 2021 and 2022 -- hitting a four-decade high of 8.1 per cent in June, 2022 -- high spending became a political liability. Most economists think that the rise in inflation was mainly driven by a combination of global supply chain disruptions, shifting consumer-spending patterns through the pandemic and a surge in commodity prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "The entire world went through a brutal pandemic, which led to inflation globally. So, I don't think we can really pin that, and the big run-up in interest rates, [on the Canadian government]," BMO chief economist Douglas Porter said last week.