University of Calgary economist Jack Mintz sat down with Power Play’s Don Martin to talk about how the parties’ policies for economic growth -- and what Canada really needs.

Here are some of his responses, and you can watch the full interview above.

Which party has the best plan for economic growth?

I actually feel we don’t really have any party with a comprehensive growth-oriented plan. If you sort of sit down and look at the Canadian economy today, we’re going through a major structural change. We’ve had 15 years of better growth, part of that has been the resource economy was doing really well, and we’ve had this super-cycle of commodity prices worldwide that’s been a benefit to Canada. That’s over. Now we have to do something different.

Having a low dollar isn’t just the answer. We have to improve our labour productivity and there’s a whole bunch of reforms that we need to consider. I think of the Australian experience back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They undertook a slew of reforms -- labour reforms, trade reforms, tax reforms, a whole bunch of things to do things.

To me, raising corporate taxes is just the wrong thing to do. We’re going to be penalizing our knowledge-based economy, our transportation industries, or communication industries. Utilities -- they actually build infrastructure. Public infrastructure is not the only answer. Private infrastructure is also important. We have a regulatory system that’s too slow, we have a tax system that’s kind of anti-infrastructure when it comes to the private sector. So there’s a whole bunch of reforms we should be thinking about.

Is going into deficit to fund infrastructure the right move?

My concern over the deficit isn’t so much whether we have a billion-dollar deficit or not. Life can go on with that. My biggest concern is what’s going to be the fiscal anchor after that.

I was around the table with Paul Martin when he was minister of finance, and he did a great job in dealing with a deficit and getting us to run surpluses, and then we had 12 succeeding years of surpluses in Canada under the Liberal and Conservative governments. That was really exceptional.

The question is, if you say we’re going to have a deficit, how far do you go down the road? The demands for public spending are infinite by individuals because they think they don’t have to pay for it. And so in the end you can end up with huge deficits, much bigger than what we’re planning, because no one is saying, ‘OK, what’s the maximum that we can tolerate.’ Once you move away from that balanced-budget type of goal, you lose that fiscal discipline. That’s my biggest concern.

Does Alberta’s oil industry need government help?

It’s very interesting what you see in Ontario, where when a sector gets in trouble like manufacturing, they’re at the government asking for handouts. In Alberta you don’t get this same desire in the business community, I think partly because they go through cycles all the time and they’re used to it. But I think Alberta’s going to be going through a major transformation, and they’re getting strongly hit for sure.