and the national electorate about policy issues that matter to the Canadian nation. MLI is equally dedicated to the proposition that the founders and early architects of Canada endowed us with something of inestimable worth: the institutions and values on which a country might be built in what was formerly British North America.
As the three authors carried on the conversation begun at the Liberty Fund event, we began to place that discussion in the context of what we knew about those origins of our country, origins that might be distant in time but that left an indelible stamp on our institutions and our character as a people. As we teased out the changes that had produced such good results for Canada over the past two decades, we were quickly drawn to see how closely those changes mirrored the plan for Canada of one of our early prime ministers, Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
Thus was born MLI’s Canadian Century project. You hold in your hand the first product of that project, but we hope it will be only one of many as the numerous fine minds associated with MLI begin to expand on the basic themes we have established in this book. Over the coming months and years the new institute will explore in more detail how smart policy in Canada can help to speed our country’s return to Laurier’s plan and the Canadian century he believed lay within our grasp. We want to thank MLI, its board of directors and supporters for the assistance and support they gave us as we struggled to tell the story of how and why Canada can, in the twenty-first century, move out of America’s shadow and claim its rightful place in the sun.
Many people are due thanks for the direct role they played in turning this narrative from a mere gleam in our eye to the book you see before you. In particular we would like to thank the following people, all of whom read and commented on the draft at various stages or otherwise contributed to the content: Chris Edwards, Tad DeHaven, Nadeem Esmail, John R. Graham, Milagros Palacios, Vicki Murray, François Vaillancourt, Don Drummond, Don Johnston, Frank McKenna, David Perry, Jock Finlayson, Colin Robertson, Sean Speer, and Bob Knox. Canada’s former ambassador to the US, Allan Gotlieb, honoured us with a foreword.
Financial support was received from numerous sources, including the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Aurea Foundation, a foundation that wishes to remain anonymous, and David Laidley.
At our publisher, Key Porter, we received the excellent editorial, technical, and marketing support that are its hallmark. In particular we would like to acknowledge the help of vice-president Tom Best, executive editor Jonathan Schmidt, designer Marijke Friesen, marketing manager Daniel Rondeau and publicist Kelly Ward.
We want to thank our families, and particularly our wives, Shelley Crowley, Kim Crosman, and Danielle Veldhuis, for the support and understanding they gave to us as we laboured under a very tight deadline to complete this book.
Finally, we would like to dedicate this book to Sir Wilfrid Laurier and his bold vision of a Canadian century, as well as to the many Canadians and their leaders who had the courage to put us back on his path to national greatness. May our generation and future ones be equal to the challenge they set out for us.
foreword
ALLAN GOTLIEB, former ambassador of Canada to the United States
Brian Crowley, Jason Clemens, and Niels Veldhuis have done a great service for Canada in writing this book. It isn’t just that they have reminded Canadians of the remarkable vision and record of one of our greatest prime ministers, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and shown how his plan for Canada is as relevant and vital to us today as it was in his day. It isn’t just that they tell more comprehensively and more clearly than anyone before them the story of a reforming generation of Canadian politicians. Nor is it just that they paint as detailed and sobering a picture as anyone on either side of the border ever has of the tax, debt and spending trap which is daily ensnaring our American friends and allies.
What they have done is to go beyond each of these individual stories, weaving them together into a single comprehensive look at the opportunities that await Canada in the twenty-first century. In so doing they reveal something of the genius of Canada. We are neither a boastful nor a prideful people, but we think that we ought to do the right thing, even if it takes us a little while to figure out what that might be. And when we get the bit between our teeth, we see things through.
On the telling of Crowley, Clemens, and Veldhuis, this portrait of the Canadian character was on full display in what they have called the Redemptive Decade, a fertile period of reform that stretched roughly from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s visionary initiative for a free trade agreement in 1988, to finance minister Paul Martin’s tabling in the House of Commons of the first balanced budget in a generation. In between, politicians of all stripes wrestled with a host of policy challenges that had been left to fester for far too long.
They reformed entitlement programs such as the Canada Pension Plan and provincial welfare. They balanced budgets. They struggled to bring down debt and taxes. They focused governments on the things they do best; not smaller government for its own sake, but smarter government that was a more effective and less wasteful instrument to promote the well-being of Canadians. They ushered in an era of free trade with the Americans, while reforming the structure of taxes through changes like the Goods and Services Tax (GST). In retrospect, as the authors lay it out for us, this group of reformers was an unlikely one. It included Saskatchewan New Democrats, Alberta and Ontario Tories, and BC and New Brunswick Liberals, as well as the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien, egged on by the Reform Party of Preston Manning, and the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney.
Region, party, and ideology took a back seat as they struggled to save Canada from self-imposed decline. And they did so remarkably successfully, creating one of the great fiscal and economic turnarounds the western world has seen in decades. Not a bad story for a country teetering on the brink, as the Wall Street Journal warned in 1995, of honorary membership in the Third World. Since Canadians put their shoulders to the wheel back then we have enjoyed a long period of growth greater than all our friends in the other G7 countries and Canada became a destination for world leaders seeking guidance and advice on how to achieve for their own countries what Canadians did for themselves.
What none of us realized at the time, but the authors of this timely and thoughtful book eloquently show, is that we were not the originators of the comprehensive reform program we were unwittingly putting in place. That honour belongs to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the first FrenchCanadian prime minister and a man who saw perhaps better than anyone before or since, the boundless opportunity of Canada and knew just what was necessary to move the opportunity from promise to reality.
Liberty was Laurier’s watchword. A Canada in which people are free—free in thought, word, conscience and action, free under the law, free from arbitrary and overweening government—this was a Canada that would attract the best and brightest from the world over. On that foundation of freedom, Laurier advised that we needed to build responsible public finances, limited but strong, and active government that promoted individual responsibility and shunned dependency, and a foreign policy that defended Canada’s interests before anything else.
Taxes, Laurier thought, were a particularly vital part of his plan. He too was a tax reformer, taking on the special interests to reform the tariff, the source of most of his government’s revenue. Ever the Canadian nationalist, Laurier also gave us a benchmark for our tax levels that he believed would invigorate Canadian entrepreneurship and innovation: we had to offer our people a tax burden that was not just competitive with the United States, but decidedly lower.
Speaking of the Americans, Laurier thought we could not leave the management of our relations with our neighbours to chance. Like Sir John A. Macdonald before him, he sought to tame America’s economic power over Canada through reciprocity, or free trade. Unlike Sir John, he was actually able to strike a deal, although it was to go down to defeat in the general election of 1911, a defeat whose consequences reverberated across
