for those seeking work, but can be tolerated well enough by society at large, provided the employed can be prevailed upon to pay for the unemployed (or underemployed). A labour shortage is the reverse: a boon for workers, whose pay and benefits can be expected to rise, but an absolute crisis for society. (If you doubt it, ask yourself which is the more acute problem: too many doctors, or too few?) Policies that might once have been at least nominally justified in the name of fighting unemployment, whether to keep people out of the labour force altogether, or to protect those with jobs from competition, or to keep people in pseudo-work via subsidies and so on, will not just become unnecessary: they will be intolerable. Everything will be directed toward freeing up every available man-hour of labour supply, to redress the chronic excess of labour demand.
Talking of labour shortage at a time of rising unemployment may seem strange, but the transitory effects of recession, Crowley argues, will soon be overtaken by the remorseless arithmetic of demography. Higher immigration will help, but can’t save us on its own. Ditto raising the retirement age. The burden of paying for all those aged baby boomers will require not just that everyone who can work do so, but that they be put to productive work. It will mean cutting taxes, to improve incentives. It will mean opening ourselves further to international trade, to better make use of the productive talents of workers in other countries. It will mean having more children, which will in turn require policies that buttress the family unit—or at least do not discourage it. It will require higher rates of internal migration, meaning policies that allow people to move to where the jobs are, rather than, as with “regional development” policies, keeping people where the jobs aren’t. It will transform not just our policies, but our politics, radically altering not just how we govern ourselves, but our cultural values as well.
Quebec, in particular, will come under increasing pressure, since its fiscal situation is already so dire, and since the proportion of its population in useful work is by far the lowest. Yet no matter how much it adjusts the policies that have contributed to this, the reality is that its population is likely to decline relative to Canada’s, as will its share of the economy. Its clout in Confederation, already on the wane, will be diminished accordingly, opening the way to a rebalancing of federal and provincial responsibilities, free of the separatist threat, on more rational lines. Not that this will necessarily prove inimical to Quebec’s desire for autonomy: with the end of the bidding war, Ottawa will no longer feel compelled to spend in areas of provincial responsibility, accepting in its place provincial acknowledgement of its exclusive power to promote the economic union. Which was, after all, one of the primary raisons d’etre of Confederation.
It is a complicated argument, and yet one that is both cogent and coherent. Indeed, I know of no other work that has so comprehensively assessed the implications of the coming era of labour shortages, or that draws them together so effectively. Taken as a whole, they add up to a compelling argument for change. For the changes he describes are inevitable, whether we will it or not: the only question is how we will manage them. Part critique, part prescription, this is more than anything a prophecy—a prophecy of a future that, as it happens, will look very much like our past.
preface
When November 15, 1976, rolled around and René Lévesque was declaring to rapturous applause in the Paul Sauvé Arena, “Je n’ai jamais été si fier d’être Québécois,” I was a parliamentary intern at the House of Commons. To a unilingual English-speaking kid from British Columbia, it was patently obvious that Quebec was where the action was. Something new and unprecedented was stirring there, and I desperately wanted both to understand it and be a part of it.
But how?
A few months later the answer became apparent when the interns took their annual trip to Quebec City to visit the National Assembly. This visit had two immediate effects on me. First, I was absolutely blown away by the vigour and eloquence of the ministers and backbenchers we met from the new government. The “projet de société” that, together with sovereignty, seemed to animate the PQ government was, to the eyes of a callow youth at any rate, unbelievably exciting and inspiring. Second, I learned that the new government had great plans to reform the province’s political institutions, and political institutions were actually something I knew something about.
On my return to Ottawa I asked Stanley Knowles, dean of the House of Commons and a towering authority on Canadian parliamentary procedure, to write me a letter to Quebec’s new minister of state for Parliamentary and Electoral Reform, Robert Burns, asking that he consider me for any jobs that might come open on his staff. Within a few days the phone was ringing and one of Burns’ top aides, André Larocque, was calling. “We don’t get many letters from Stanley Knowles,” he said.
I was in.
There was the little matter of not speaking a word of French, but it is amazing what you can do when you are motivated. As Wordsworth said of an earlier time of hope and excitement in another French-speaking land: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” In my blissful state I threw myself into learning the French language with all the zeal of a convert. The deal I had made with Burns was that I would work part-time for him and study part time at Laval University. As my French got better and better, I went less and less to my classes. At the end of six months I was learning so much more at work than at the university that I stopped going altogether.
It wasn’t just mastering French that drove me. I wanted to be part of a new society that many of us thought we were creating, a French-speaking society committed to social justice that would make a break from the morally dubious English-speaking capitalism that had brought us Vietnam, Richard Nixon, energy crises, the CIA and so much more. And not only was Robert Burns a leading nationalist, he was also a famously left-wing trade union leader. He made René Lévesque so nervous that the new premier felt constrained to warn Burns that the new government was not going to adopt the “Cuban model” of economic and social development.
I pretty much went native.
But heart and head were not pulling together in harness, and as I grew older the head increasingly argued the heart into following its lead—especially as the heart began to have galling suspicions that it had been duped. It began with the nagging discomfort I felt with the dismissive contempt that met the legitimate aspirations of English-speakers and the unapologetic use of the state’s coercive powers to push English to the back of the bus.
It was at this point, as Andrew Coyne relates in the foreword, that I went off to do graduate studies at the London School of Economics. There I came to grips, metaphorically speaking, with F.A. Hayek, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who was one of the twentieth century’s most doughty defenders of liberal-capitalism. I wanted to prove him wrong; instead, the richness and breadth of his argument made me confront the shallowness of many of my own economic ideas. Scepticism about the benevolence of big government began to tinge my thinking.
Hard on the heels of my return to Canada came the era of big constitutional reform. I was a negotiator of both the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional accords, and became ever more disturbed about the degree to which the country was tying itself in knots to accommodate Quebec when it was clear that Quebec’s demands were more and more obviously arguments of convenience designed to maximize their bargaining power under threat of referendums to break up the country.
A fifteen-year period ensued in which I set aside my preoccupation with Quebec and its place within Canada in favour of a different project: challenging Atlantic Canadians to reject the damage that had been wrought on them and their economy by decades of well-intentioned but deeply misguided policy, including by Ottawa. An intrepid band, of which I was a member, founded a think-tank, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) in Halifax, and we dug in for a long battle of attrition in the war of ideas. When we opened our doors, it was a courageous person indeed who was willing to say that, on balance, dependence on transfers from Ottawa had been a bad thing
