To an outsider, the ins and outs of Canadian politics must seem quite illogical — and for lots of good reasons — but L. Wayne Mathison offers an explanation that may help:
I think the “constraints” framework explains a surprising amount of Canadian politics.
Canada increasingly governs as though good intentions can overrule physical and economic limits.
We want more housing, but often ignore land-use rules, permitting delays, skilled-trade shortages, infrastructure capacity and construction costs.
We want better health care, but governments can promise “universal access” far more easily than they can produce doctors, nurses, operating rooms, diagnostic machines and hours in the day.
We want rapid population growth, while pretending housing, roads, schools and hospitals will expand at the same speed.
We want reliable electricity while making major generation and transmission projects harder to build.
We want higher wages and stronger public services while giving far less attention to productivity, capital investment and the businesses that ultimately generate the income being taxed.
This is where I think the constrained versus unconstrained distinction is useful.
Politics often treats shortages as failures of compassion or policy design. But sometimes the problem is much simpler: you cannot legislate resources into existence.
I learned that farming. You could have the best plan in the world, but weather, machinery, labour, soil, interest rates and time still had the final vote. Reality didn’t care how sincere you were.
Government faces the same rule.
This doesn’t mean government is useless, and it doesn’t mean every left-wing idea ignores constraints or every conservative understands them. Plenty don’t. But Canadian policy would improve dramatically if every proposal had to answer one basic question:
What are the real-world bottlenecks, and what happens when we hit them?
You can redistribute money. You can rewrite regulations. You can announce targets.
You cannot redistribute houses that haven’t been built, doctors who don’t exist, electricity that hasn’t been generated or productivity that hasn’t been created.
Eventually the physical world collects its bill.
