The Sage of Chicago on Fearful Symmetry

Donald Coxe, Chairman, Coxe Advisors LLC, and Strategy Advisor, BMO Capital Markets, is a well-known and influential global investment strategist, based in Chicago but closely allied with BMO, giving him a high profile in Canada in particular.

Coxe does a regular conference call to brief clients and others about his view of where markets are going. In his call of February 5th, in honour of the Olympics, he gave a strongly Canadian spin to the discussion, focusing on the many reasons why Canada did so well in the recession and why its economic future is relatively bright. To introduce the discussion he spent some time talking about Fearful Symmetry and how it helps people to get a good grasp of the unique circumstances that await Canada as the coming labour shortages and demographic change really start to bite.

His commentary is on-line and available until the next one is posted on February 19th.

Here is a short excerpt:

 

Jeffrey Simpson reviews Fearful Symmetry

Fearful Symmetry in the Halifax Herald

This review first appeared in the Halifax Herald on January 3. It is no longer available online so I’m reproducing it here.

Socialist policies will be history, Crowley predicts

By JEFFREY SIMPSON

BRIAN Lee Crowley predicts that Canada is on the cusp of a profound economic and cultural change that will take the country back to its ideological roots, even if they are unfamiliar to many citizens.

Crowley, the well-known conservative thinker who founded the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, makes a compelling argument in his recently published book, Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values, that the last five decades spent as a nation with socialist leanings has been merely an aberration. Read more

CanadianImmigrant.ca discovers Fearful Symmetry

CanadianImmigrant.ca posted a review of Fearful Symmetry by George Abraham that shows that *somebody* at least is paying attention to what the book has to say about immigrants, a vital part of Canada’s future.

The review, available here, draws attention to the fact that most commentators in Canada are reluctant to tell it like it is in any politically sensitive areas:

Brian Lee Crowley strikes me as an unlikely Canadian. In his just-published book, Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values, he not only debunks many myths about this country, but does it directly and without pulling any punches. Evidently, Crowley is not given to political correctness — that quintessential Canadian value — and does not mind offending a few people, particularly those in Quebec.

But this reviewer, unlike many others, also recognises that I am not out to single out Quebec. There are lots of people who are benefiting from the ill-advised policies of the last 50 years, policies instituted in large part to accommodate the Boomer rush into the workforce plus the rise of Quebec nationalism. On the other hand, it is not often recognised that those poor policies harm the most vulnerable in our society, including immigrants:

To sum up, in Crowley’s reckoning, immigrants who are down on their luck and have been ejected from the workforce during this recession will benefit from the looming labour shortages. But even then they will be hobbled by what the writer rightly calls a “scandal” unworthy of Canada, the non-recognition of immigrant qualifications. He calls it like it is: “Theirs is a transparent effort to protect not the interests of supposedly vulnerable and ignorant consumers but rather the interests of those already exercising these professions in Canada.”

Labour Force’s Fearful Symmetry at a glance

 

We decided not to include many of the graphics in Fearful Symmetry, in part because of the technical difficulties in doing so, and in part because books with lots of graphs, charts and tables are, my publisher assures me, very unpopular with the reading public. They look like work rather than fun. That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t make them available to you. From time to time I will publish some of them here on the blog. Here is one of my favourites: it shows in a very powerful way the turning point in the labour supply as we go from the Boomer-era of unemployment to the labour shortages of the post-Boomer period. This draws on some fine work by Roger Sauvé, Labour Crunch to 2021: National and Provincial Labour Force Projections, (Summerstown, Ont.: People Patterns Consulting, March 2007), amended with updated Finance projections.

What it all means

Two forces have shaped Canada profoundly in the last fifty years: the entry of  Boomers into the workforce and the rise of a separatist Quebec nationalism. Large-scale unemployment plus the threat of the breakup of the country caused Canada to jettison its traditional values—a ferocious work ethic, a commitment to the family as the most important social institution, a suspicion of overweening government and an aversion to dependence—in favour of a vast expansion of the welfare state. We rapidly became a nation of “takers” rather than the “makers” we had always been. But the tide is about to turn with a vengeance: the Boomers are retiring and Quebec nationalism is increasingly a spent force, presaging a resurgence of our founders’ values that had served us so well. Thought-provoking and meticulously documented, Fearful Symmetry will change the way you think about Canada.