Few people deserve more thanks than my colleagues at AIMS. They patiently endured my absence for almost two years while I was on loan to Finance Canada, and then supported me when I came back with writing lust in my eye and holed up with my computer for months on end. They never complained and indeed made sure that I was left alone, deflecting many importunate requests for my time and attention. In particular I want to thank the three key staffers, Charles Cirtwill, Barbara Pike, and Bobby O’Keefe, as well as the board of directors and especially the chairman, John Irving, for their unfailing backing.
An awful lot of people were strong-armed by me into reading some or all of the manuscript, which they all did with alacrity and good grace. They include: Tom Flanagan, William Johnson, Janet Ajzenstat, Alan Beattie, William Gairdner, Barbara Kay, Doug Allen, Andrea Mrozek, Rebecca Walberg, John Richards, John Weissenberger, Angela Tu-Weissenberger, Brian Flemming, David Frum, Martin Masse, Daniel Dufort, Jack Granatstein, Brian Ferguson, Jason Clemens, Peter White, Richard Bastien, David MacKinnon, Drew Bethune, Paula Minnikin, and Robin Neill. Their comments, which were copious but always constructive, allowed me to avoid a lot of mistakes while tightening the argument and strengthening its defences.
Much that is good in this book is due to the kind assistance of the many friends and colleagues I have mentioned here; and while I would love to be able to blame them, the truth is that all errors, of whatever kind, are attributable solely to me.
PART ONE | CANADA OLD AND NEW
1
introduction: symmetry’s halves
Freud was once asked what he thought a normal person should be able to do well. The questioner probably expected a complicated answer. But Freud, in the curt way of his old days, is reported to have said: “Lieben und arbeiten” (to love and to work). It pays to ponder on this simple formula; it gets deeper as you think about it.
ERIK H. ERIKSON, CHILDHOOD AND SOCIETY
Forget July 1, the birthday of the Old Canada founded in 1867. The “New Canada” was born on June 22, 1960. The profound transformation that emerged so forcefully in the last five decades or so can be summarized as a Canada of expansive government and social programs, of bilingualism and multiculturalism, of the appeasement of an endless list of demands from Quebec nationalists, of the abandonment of anything but a highly sanitized history of the country, of the decline of the work ethic, of the family and of our fertility. The birth date can be fixed with such precision because that was the day that Jean Lesage led the Liberal Party of Quebec to power and unleashed the Quiet Revolution.
The gestation period of the New Canada, however, goes back a further fifteen years or so. The New Canada was being prepared in the wombs of Canadian women in the form of the post-war baby boom. Had the Province of Quebec not been awash in young French-speakers about to enter the workforce in the early sixties, and had Quebec nationalism not become the means by which those young workers were to be accommodated in our society and economy, the history of Canada would almost certainly have been profoundly different.
The election of the Lesage government in Quebec in 1960 brought to a fever pitch the expectations of an emerging French-speaking middle class and intelligentsia looking for opportunities hitherto denied them in a largely English-speaking economy. Lacking much in the way of levers over the private economy beyond completing the nationalization of electricity, the Lesage government acted by increasing those opportunities chiefly in the provincial public sector, ramping up taxpayer-funded jobs and other programs and the taxes and federal transfers to pay for them.
Simultaneously two transfers of ideological allegiance were occurring in Quebec. The first was from the Church to the State. The second was from French Canada to Quebec, an allegiance energized by the powerful symbolism of a national majority in charge of its own destiny.
These changes provoked a powerful but not always effective response from Ottawa, the most important elements of which were a determination to cede to the Quebec state neither the role of chief architect of social justice for Quebeckers, nor that of protector of the French language. Through bilingualism and the Just Society (Pierre Trudeau’s 1968 campaign slogan), the federal government sought to show Quebec that its social, economic, and linguistic aspirations could be realized within Canada, whatever the cost.
Into this world of ideological ferment and massive increase in the size of both the Quebec and the federal governments marched the unsuspecting Boomers looking for work. The proportion of people of working age in the population rose from its long-term share of about 60 per cent in the mid-1960s to nearly 70 per cent today.1 A sustained increase of nearly 10 percentage points is an economy-shaking event, one about to be mirrored by a corresponding decline now that the working-age population has peaked (in 2008),2 and the supply of workers will start to dry up in earnest in 2011–12.3
A different way of thinking about what has happened is that over the last fifty years the number of workers in Canada grew more, proportionally speaking, than any other major industrialized country. From 1956 to 2006, our workforce grew by 200 per cent, and the growth in the number of young people of working age in Quebec led the pack in the early days. Even America, our nearest rival, was well behind us, growing by a relatively restrained 120 per cent or so. By contrast, in the next fifty years, it is our workforce that will grow by a paltry 11 per cent—better than many of our European counterparts, who will see shrinkage in absolute terms—but well behind America, where the number of workers will grow by nearly a third.4 We’ll return to this theme of the looming labour shortages facing our country in a moment.
In his award-winning book, Born at the Right Time: The History of the Baby Boom Generation, Doug Owram defines the “Boomers” as those born between 1946 and 1962, a period in which the number of children born annually never fell below 400,000. In Boom, Bust and Echo, renowned economic demographer David Foot argues for somewhat different dates; for him the boom started in 1947 and ended in 1966.5 At the height of the baby boom in 1959, the number of annual births exceeded 479,000. On Owram’s account, between 1946 and 1961, 6.7 million babies were born in Canada. For Foot, because the boom lasted a few years longer, it was even more pronounced, adding over 7.5 million people to the Canadian population. Whichever of these accounts one chooses, the boomer generation was to have a profound effect on Canadian economic, political, and social life.6
The Boomers created a lot of anxiety for the politicians of the day. Nicole Morgan7 summed up what became the conventional description of what happened: the Canadian government needed to
act as a social safety valve ... and open the doors of the public service to a part of the 7.5 million young Canadians of the baby boom generation. After 1960, they were hitting the labour market in wave after wave, and certainly could never have all been absorbed by the private sector. [Emphasis added]
Despite the conventional view that we would have been overwhelmed by Boomers had governments not hoovered them up, we will never know whether the marketplace would have absorbed the Boomers and women into the private economy; I am firmly convinced, however, that it would have done so with gusto, since a wave of available and willing workers is a massive opportunity—unless governments get in the way, as they did in the Depression, for example.8 In fact, the closest analogue we have, the crush of workers moving into the economy following the end of World War II, gives strong confidence that worries about the economy’s inability to absorb a wave of new workers are profoundly misplaced. In the United States during this period, workers from rural areas flooded the cities, with the happy consequence that they kept wage pressures low while the economy was going gangbusters. That meant profits for companies, who then reinvested in further productive capacity, pulling in yet more workers.9
As we will see as the story of the last fifty years unfolds,
