from the University of Edinburgh are treated on an equal footing with those from Lower Elbonia when they try to immigrate to Canada, and engineers from India and Iran find the path to exercising their profession in this country blocked at every turn. Manufacturers of yellow margarine in provinces like Ontario or New Brunswick have only very recently earned the “right” to sell that margarine in the province of Quebec, and we finally have at least embryonic trade in electricity across provincial boundaries only because the Americans required reciprocal market access if we wanted to sell electricity to them. And let us not forget that the rise of the Boomers in the workforce coincided with the emergence of anti-free trade sentiment embodied in measures like foreign investment restrictions and government requirements that broadcasters use Canadian songs and programming on radio and TV, while barriers were thrown up to foreign (and especially American) cultural products.
Nor should we in our inventory of responses to the confluence of Quebec nationalism and the baby boom generation neglect the creation of a lot of public sector “employment” whose principal function was to give a salary to the incumbent rather than to provide any useful and productive service to the public or the economy. These were jobs in government departments, Crown corporations, and subsidized private companies, jobs that had little economic rationale but plenty of political payoff. To this phenomenon I have attached the name “pseudo-work,” but the more traditional “make-work” or “featherbedding” would do just as well.
Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, and their successors created whole new departments with no known function, such as the ministries of state for urban affairs, multiculturalism, science and technology; ministers were created for consumer affairs, international trade, financial institutions, sport, and other things already perfectly well looked after by existing departments.15 Direct and indirect public employment skyrocketed.
Transfers to the provinces shot up and had the desired effect, especially in low-growth provinces: today Ontario has 67 municipal and provincial employees per thousand residents, while Newfoundland has 89 and Manitoba 105.16
To prevent workers from areas with few jobs from moving to areas of economic growth, and possibly undermining wage growth there through their willingness to accept jobs at lower pay, unemployment insurance and regional development policy were given starring roles. They muted the signals that the job market was trying to send to workers in economically underdeveloped parts of the country to the effect that their current industry and work could not, in the long run, provide them with a sustainable standard of living. Regional development policy came along and subsidized weak natural resource industries with low levels of investment and poor productivity, to keep jobs going long after their economic rationale had ceased to exist. The wholly predictable result was that movement of people around the country to seek out new opportunities took a nosedive. One of the traditional motors of Canadian economic growth stalled, and for decades the trend was down, down, down, until about 2003–04.
Despite (or, as some of us think, because of ) all this massive effort, unemployment marched inexorably higher and rose to be the number one political preoccupation of Canadians for many years.
Our work ethic, regarded by our forefathers as one of the most ennobling distinguishing characteristics of Canadian society, was thus put under severe pressure by a state suddenly offering enticing alternatives that hadn’t existed before on anything like the same scale. The pressure spread to the other institution that had been traditionally regarded as the cornerstone of Canadian life—not government but the family. Divorce and abortion rates rose, marriage and fertility rates plummeted, helped along, as I will show later, by a state that took over many traditional functions of the family but didn’t perform them nearly as well.
Again because it helps us to put the change in perspective and to see how much we were changing and how quickly, the comparison with the United States is instructive. According to a recent Hoover Institution study comparing marriage and family between our two countries, from similar starting points almost thirty years ago (i.e., in 1980) our two societies’ behaviour where family is concerned has diverged markedly. Whereas Canadians had 25 per cent more children than Americans, the reverse is now true; our fertility level is a quarter below that of Americans. In 1975, our marriage rate of 9 per 1,000 population was just below the U.S. rate of 10 per 1,000. Today the Canadian marriage rate is only 60 per cent of the U.S. rate, although both have declined.17
Speaking of divergences with the United States, the economic one was becoming increasingly troubling. And yet in 1960, the respective standards of living of our two countries had been almost indistinguishable. Since then our productivity and our standard of living have both been in long-term decline relative to our neighbour. Americans, too, allowed some growth in the size of government, but the scale and speed of their increases were dwarfed by the changes in Canada, and they recoiled before the consequences of large-scale redistribution and welfare dependence as the manifest failings of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and its progeny came into clear focus.18 Our unemployment, our standard of living, our productivity, all had been highly competitive with the United States, but the gap has widened in favour of our neighbours over the ensuing decades. In 1960, a difference of just 8.1 per cent in favour of the Americans separated real per capita income in the United States and Canada.19 But by 1999 the real per capita income gap was on the order of 22 per cent in favour of the United States.20 And while the current economic downturn has cast a temporary pall over America’s economic portrait, the foundations of its better long-term performance remain intact: its entrepreneurial energy, its inventiveness, its technological prowess and its deeply ingrained work ethic, for example, have not gone away.
This account of the history of the last fifty years will seem unbelievable and even offensive to those raised with the official version of our recent history, namely that we had always been a kinder, gentler society than those laissez-faire Americans; that French-speaking Quebeckers had been discriminated against and we had to put right the historical wrongs that had been done to them; that we had to expand government because the private sector could never have absorbed all those workers flooding into the labour market. Such a use of government was merely an extension of our long-standing propensity to use the state for grand public purposes, a kind of natural deduction from Peace, Order, and Good Government.
This account, however, will not stand up under examination—it is wrong on almost every point. Only by setting the record straight will we come to have an appreciation of the real causes of many of the ills that assail us: hostility between Quebec and the rest of the country; transfer dependency by individuals and governments; the decline of both fertility and the family; and government that has become a powerful brake on our economic and social progress.
Vertigo Warning: Don’t Look Down
This is not, however, a pessimistic book, although it certainly chronicles many tragically lost opportunities for Canada. I am an optimist because, fortunately, the ebbing of the flow of Boomers is about to lay bare for all to see the consequences of our mistakes of the past half century and to remind us of why the cultural, social, and economic values of our first century as a nation served us better than those we put in their place. The fearful symmetry to which the title of this book refers is nothing less than the rise of the New Canada under the impact of Boomers and Quebec nationalism over the last fifty years, and its unwinding over the next fifty years as the Boomer generation and Quebec’s bargaining power within Confederation both recede.
The precursors of the change that is coming—symmetry’s turning point—are there for all to see. One small wave has already washed over us. We are in the trough between the two, and the second, much bigger, wave is now towering above us.
The first wave struck us in the early eighties. According to David Foot,
the Canadian Boomers entered the labour force from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s so over this period Canada experienced declining population growth but higher labour force growth resulting
