Last week’s budget, he wrote, “locks up Canada’s lead.”
Most times, Frum is pretty bright. This time, he’s grasped hold of a fact and inflated it into a misshapen factoid.
Canada is indeed in excellent shape these days, most certainly so when compared to almost all other “advanced democracies.” And we aren’t at all badly governed, although I would put Norway well ahead of us.
But none of this has anything to do with the budget or with the Harper government’s financial management since it gained power in 2006, nor with Harper himself.
Instead, the causes of our contemporary complacency are threefold:
• Mostly, it’s because we’re enjoying a commodities boom (as are Australia and Brazil), thanks to the almost limitless demand created by the headlong economic growth in China, India and elsewhere. Even an ineptly governed economy could do well, so long as it has spare rocks and logs and oil,
• Our national finances were put into good shape before Harper gained office. This was done in the 1990s by then finance minister Paul Martin. Keeping our financial books in order has now become part of Canadians’ national identity, sort of in the way our health-care system has long been, but may not be that much longer.
• Lastly, we owe a lot to our famously “boring” banks. In fact, they owe a lot back to the rest of us: In exchange for quite strict regulation they enjoy protection from foreign competition and permission to operate as — effectively — a cartel. As is all that really matters, they never go bankrupt.
The consequence of all of this is that all of our stars are now in a row, pretty much as they were for us after World War II when the Cold War created a huge demand for our resources at the same time that many of our competitors had been left bomb-shattered and bankrupt.
The Harper government’s main contribution has been to not muck things up. It has erred: Had it not cut the GST in order to win votes, our budget would just about be in balance already. It has also sometimes done well, deserving high marks for its current attempt — the first in ages — to reform the badly constipated immigration system it inherited from its predecessors.
It’s always risky to shower praise on politicians, though: Their unvarying response is to become fatheaded.
The budget’s architect, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, is showing clear signs of this. He’s taken to seizing on every opportunity to send out the word that, unlike his own government, the Ontario government “needs to manage its finances better.”
The comparison is out of kilter. The recession put both governments into deficit. But the tax revenues generated by the commodities boom are putting the federal government into balance pretty painlessly.
Ontario’s circumstances are radically different. As a manufacturing economy, it has to, in effect, compete with China, which is a far tougher challenge than trying to sell rocks and logs and oil to China.
Add to this the burden on Ontario manufacturers of the high-priced dollar caused by the commodities boom and the revenues lost to its government because of equalization payments going from Ontario to provinces with lower unemployment rates (Manitoba’s rate is 50 per cent lower).
The issue isn’t Ontario’s troubles, some self-generated. It’s the lousy governance generated by a quite unnecessary and mutually damaging squabble between a national government that’s having it easy and a major province that’s having it hard.
On reflection, there’s no doubt whatever the Norwegians do things better, including — this by an ever-widening margin now — the way they manage their oil industry.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Richard Gwyn
No comments:
Post a Comment