Barrel Strength

The US is bankrupt. Canada is not. Therein lies a remarkable possibility for this country in the next twenty years.

Two books should be part of the reading of Canadians of all political persuasions, especially conservatives. The first was Brian Lee Crowley’s “Fearful Symmetry”, which explained what went wrong in Canada under Trudeau and successive governments until Mulroney introduced North American free trade and then Chretien (yes, Chretien) fixed our public finances. The second is “The Canadian Century”, by the same Brian Lee Crowley, Jason Clemens, and Niels Veldhuis. Both are examinations of the public finances of Canada, and to read these books is to understand, at the highest level, what has gone right and wrong with our society. Crowley never ceases to set out the moral dimension of excessive public expenditure: the electorate drunk on government services, the cost of which is deferred to future generations; the creation of pseudo-jobs; the electoral blocs of state dependents which prevent the correction of the very problem that their existence creates, and so forth.

Crowley and his co-authors make it abundantly clear that:

1) Laurier, not MacDonald, should be attributed the credit for a low-tax, free-trade policy – the classic hallmarks of what we now call “conservatism”, and

2) Bill Clinton waged a successful campaign to get the US fiscal house in order, and that both Bush the elder and the younger, to say nothing of Obama, have run the US into massive debt. In other words, Bush the younger squandered the legacy that Clinton handed to him. (Canadian Century, at pp 116-117) Clinton: bastion of fiscal probity. We conservatives need to absorb that.

Now peace upon all those partizans of conservative government who think that mentioning any merit in any liberal, no matter how long dead, is akin to “deserting the cause, that gave us our freedom, religion and laws.” The points I am making here are twofold.

First, these two books are a rapid and painless education in the essential facts of politics: how we finance government is as much a moral as it is an immediately monetary question, and it gives insight behind the squabbles in Parliament, which are of little account in the history of nations. No wonder the people who really  understand money are not fussed by whether the Liberals take over; they are only concerned with how public finances will affect the value of their investments. Conservatives do not have a better penchant for fixing them than Liberals, in both Canada and the United States, according to these writers.

Second, the Canadian Century establishes the current Conservative government in Canada is not doing a great job in sustaining the gains that Chretien and Martin made in fixing our public finances. Why conservatives should care about this issue is explained in The Canadian Century. It is a must read for the politically literate.