I tend to avoid reading right-wing rants about Canada, having had a surfeit of them in my youth. Publius makes a case for Fearful Symmetry being, perhaps, an exception to my general rule:
Crowley, a founder and long-time head of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, has spent decades preaching the free market gospel in some of the most inhospitable climes in North America for such a message. The theme of the book is tradition, Canadian tradition. A mental framework that dominated the first century of Canada’s existence as a federal state. Thrift, family, economic individualism and small and limited governments were the hallmarks of Canada then. A confluence of two powerful forces, the first the entrance of the baby boomers into the workforce, and second the emergence of Quebec nationalism in the wake of the Quiet Revolution, provoked a dramatic – and detrimental change in public policy and cultural attitudes. Crowley does not dismiss the importance of ideas in the shift to bigger and more intrusive government. He notes that Canada’s volte face from its traditional approach was more dramatic than other nations with a similar history, notably the United States and Australia. Broad intellectual trends set the stage, but it was specific Canadian factors that gave us our current Canadian sized government.
Crowley begins with demography; the baby boom. A jump in the birth rate in the fifteen or so years after the end of the Second World War. This major blip in the demographic charts was more intense in Canada than elsewhere in the developed world.
[. . .]
Economists have blamed this liberalization for Canada’s higher structural unemployment over the last forty years. UI, over time, also acquired regional variations, being especially generous to underdeveloped parts of Canada. In tandem with liberalized UI, straight welfare was also expanded. Combined they produced a gigantic welfare trap. The end result can be seen in Margaret Wente’s notorious, though accurate, description of Newfoundland as “the most vast and scenic welfare ghetto in the world.” To finance this generosity the federal government expanded equalization, the transfer of wealth between the richer and poorer regions of Canada. Until the mid-1970s there were only two “have” provinces, Ontario and British Columbia. The main weight of equalization, however, fell upon the Dominion’s largest, richest and most industrialized province, Ontario. When the province’s premier in the 1960s, the charismatic John P Robarts, was questioned about the burdens of equalization, he justified it thusly: Ontario was in effect exporting purchasing power to the other regions of Canada.
