V. Thursby
Electronic formatting: Sonya V. Thursby
For Shelley, who knew I could
when I thought I couldn’t
THE TYGER
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
—William Blake
foreword andrew coyne
I first met Brian Crowley when we were studying at the London School of Economics together, back in the 1980s. He had come over to do his Ph.D. on Friedrich Hayek, the great free-market theorist and contender, along with Friedman and Keynes, for the title of most influential economist of the twentieth century. As a good social democrat—for so he then was—Crowley had set himself the ambitious task of debunking Hayek. But in the course of his research, he had found himself at first unable to answer his arguments, and at last persuaded by them. In a word, he had become a convert.
Whatever that tells us about the power of Hayek’s analysis, I think it tells us something essential about the author of this profoundly important book: his intellectual honesty; his unblinking openness to facts and reasoned arguments, even those that contradict his preconceptions; above all his fearlessness. He will go where the argument leads him, and let the chips fall where they may. And where it leads him, in the present case, is nothing less than a revolution in our way of looking at Canada, its history, and its future.
That’s “revolution,” in its original sense: as a turning full circle, a return to what once was. It is Crowley’s contention that Canada is about to complete such a revolution—that after fifty years of ever-expanding government, spending, and taxation, we are entering an equally lengthy cycle in which all of these processes will be reversed: beneficially, necessarily, inevitably, as the tides. If the first part of the book is concerned with describing how the tide came in—how the all-providing, ever-encroaching state came to be, with all of its baleful effects on work, on family, on our very souls—the second is spent in happy contemplation of the departing tide, and the rediscovery of those historic virtues of limited government, hard work, and familial commitment on which the country was founded.
For in truth it is the last fifty years, he argues, that have been the aberration. Though mythologized by nationalists as the outgrowth of an inborn cultural bias toward big government that marked us apart from the Americans, Crowley argues convincingly that the growth of the state in Canada had more prosaic origins. Rather, he says, it grew out of the confluence of two separate but not unrelated trends: the explosive growth in the labour force as the “baby boom” cohort reached working age, and the growing threat of Quebec separatism. Beginning in the early 1960s, each set off a kind of panic in policy makers: the first, that the labour market would not prove able to absorb all these newcomers; the second, that the new generation of nationalist francophones in Quebec would carry the province out of the country—not least if Canada could not find work for them.
It was debatable whether either threat was as real as all that. Labour markets are marvellously adaptable things, and separation, as we have learned, is massively difficult, if not impossible to carry off. The point is that policy makers believed they were real. And through the decades that followed, events seemed to validate their concerns. Unemployment was the defining issue of economic policy for most of the period under study, while separatism seemed to reach new peaks with each wave of the political cycle—though whether either flourished in spite of or because of the policies intended to alleviate them is another matter.
What to do with all those young workers was not a preoccupation limited to Canada, of course. Across the developed world, governments wrestled with the same problem. In an age of seemingly permanent unemployment, any policy that would find jobs for the jobless seemed worth a try. And coinciding as it did with the highwater mark of faith in state solutions—memories of wartime planning were still fresh, and theories of Keynesian demand management had yet to be discredited by actual contact with the real world—the answer in almost every country was more government. Inflation, protectionism, subsidies, make-work programs or what Crowley calls “pseudo-work”—socially useless feather-bedding, usually in the public sector—all could be justified, whatever the costs, by the pressing need to mop up all that surplus labour. Or so it seemed.
But why did government grow so much faster and further in Canada than, say, the United States? If it was not because of any innate predisposition to statism in America’s northern neighbour—for if so, it should surely have manifested itself in the preceding century, when Canada was the more classically liberal of the two—then what can explain it? Crowley’s provocative answer: the coincident rise of Quebec nationalism, starting with the Quiet Revolution, when the Catholic Church was replaced by the secular religion of the state, the sword and shield of the francophone ascendancy.
The effect was to set off a bidding war between the governments of Quebec and Canada for the allegiance, if that is the right word, of Quebecers. It was not a strategy calculated to Canada’s advantage—for whatever was wrong with Quebec could always be blamed on the insufficiency of federal largesse, while whatever the feds did provide could always be chalked up to the efficacy of separatist blackmail. But it fit with the climate of the times. And in no time the battle spilled over into the rest of Canada: whatever programs were initiated, whatever powers were conceded, whatever money was spent in the name of wooing Quebec soon became the norm in other provinces as well.
But if work is not useful and productive, something we do for others, but something provided as a gift of government, when it is not actively penalizing it—for why encourage more work effort when there is already too much of it?—then the effect is to breed contempt for work, the more so if those who do the productive work are taxed more heavily to pay for those who do not. And if at the same time policies are enacted, fiscal or otherwise, that undercut incentives to marry and raise a family—for why would a society overrun with surplus labour want more children?—then society loses the principal means of instilling the habits of character on which productive work depends. And if the state, rather than the market, becomes the central mechanism by which resources are allocated, then lobbying government and flattering politicians will replace producing goods and services for consumers as the primary means of advancement, each seeking to harness the coercive power of the state to force others to pay for his upkeep. Or in Crowley’s pithy phrase, making will be replaced by taking.
All of these effects are described in detail in the book, and all are observed in their most virulent form in Quebec, where the state ballooned to its greatest size and where the ethos of taking became the habit of mind not merely of “rent-seeking” special interests, but of an entire society—the “profitable federalism” that Quebecers have been taught to expect the rest of Canada to deliver, and that now forms the basis for what remains of their attachment to Canada.
Left at that, Crowley’s analysis would be provocative enough. What truly sets his argument apart, however, and what makes this such an original contribution to the national debate, is what comes next. For the twin motors powering the rise of the state, he writes—the baby boom and Quebec nationalism—are both about to be thrown into reverse: arguably in the latter case, incontrovertibly in the former. As the baby boomers reach retirement age—beginning next year—and withdraw from the labour market, the proportion of the population of working age will contract: from a peak of five workers to every retiree not long ago, the ratio is projected to shrink to three or even two to one. The labour surplus that was the perennial obsession of policy makers will become a permanent labour shortage. And with that, he argues, everything will change.
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