Text of my speech to the IMFC Family conference
On March 11 I was the keynote speaker at the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada’s conference on family policy. I spoke about what we know today about the relationship between the health of the institution of the family and the transmission between the generations of values essential to democracy, freedom and the rule of law. Below is the text of that speech.
The Future of Federal Transfers
I was recently invited by the Federal-Provincial Relations Division of Finance Canada to participate in a panel discussion in Ottawa on the future of federal transfers to the provinces. Here is the text of my remarks.
Social change: Paul Wells say Fearful Symmetry shows the way
In this week’s Maclean’s magazine Paul Wells spends a lot of time discussing Fearful Symmetry and the social policy changes it portends:
“For next steps, many conservatives are turning to Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values, a new book by Brian Lee Crowley, an economist and founder of the new Macdonald – Laurier Institute.
Crowley does not regard himself as a social conservative. But many who do see themselves that way like what he’s saying. To caricature a complex argument, Crowley says the modern welfare state has overextended itself, is unsustainable, and causes more harm than good to institutions like the family. These trends will only get worse when an aging population sharply increases the cost of delivering most social programs. One size can no longer fit all. Social services will have to be narrowly aimed at those who need them most, and delivered only as long as recipients are willing to improve their behaviour by attending to their family, keeping or seeking a job, and so on.
Government is no good at any of that and, in the opinion of most, shouldn’t try. “It is precisely for this reason, in my view, that we have seen in both the United States and the United Kingdom a growing use of the private sector, including the not-for-profit and so-called faith-based charities, for the delivery of social services,†Crowley writes. “Such private agencies may be more demanding of their clientele and expect more in the way of improvements in behaviour.â€
Crowley’s book was published last autumn. It seems to have been barely one step ahead of the news. This month’s Throne Speech contained a single line saying the government “will look to innovative charities and forward-thinking private-sector companies to partner on new approaches to many social challenges.†Such charities and companies were much in evidence at the Manning Centre conference. The changes Crowley anticipates are expected and embraced by social conservatives.
Meanwhile, the federal Liberals are still defending policies from five years ago, policies Harper has taken pains to ensure future federal governments won’t be able to afford, with his GST cuts and his massive cash transfers to the provinces. If the Liberals cannot begin to make a case for a return to larger, more activist — and more expensive — state-run social welfare, then Stephen Harper’s social conservative revolution will only accelerate.
IMFC Family conference 2010 – audio clips
On March 11 I was the keynote speaker at the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada’s conference on family policy. I spoke about what we know today about the relationship between the health of the institution of the family and the transmission between the generations of values essential to democracy, freedom and the rule of law. Below are some audio clips from my talk.
The Aboriginal Wizard of Oz
This is the first in a wonderful series of articles in The Australian by Noel Pearson, an Australian Aborigine and the Director of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership. Mr Pearson is clearly part of a world-wide awakening among young Aboriginal leaders questioning whether the social service state can really solve the problems of Aboriginal peoples, as opposed to Aboriginal people rising up and taking their own fate in their hands. Every word in this series applies with equal justice to the deplorable plight of Aboriginals in Canada. As Mr Pearson writes:
What my opponents and sceptics from the Left have failed to understand is that when we talk about disempowerment being the singular and devastating feature of Aboriginal Australia, we mean that our people have had their responsibilities taken away from us. Responsibility is power. If we want our people to be empowered, then we need to take back the responsibilities that the welfare state has stripped away from us.”
Noel Pearson’s original article generated a plethora of mostly predictable commentary of the type “Non-Aboriginal Australians would love to have the kind of all encompassing tax-financed welfare services that Aboriginals enjoy.” Pearson’s rebuttal, also in The Australian a few days later, is a joy to read:…
There is no freedom of private choice and action when governments have assumed responsibilities that are normally undertaken by responsible parents and individuals. That government intervention has crowded out the responsibilities of individuals, families and communities is my point.
It is a misinterpretation of history to say that service provisioning followed a lack of responsibility. Aboriginal people never chose welfare as the basis of their inclusion in the country’s citizenship. They wanted equal wages, not welfare. They wanted a hand-up, not a handout. They wanted freedom from discrimination and racism.
But the welfare state regarded Aboriginal people as helpless and hopeless. It has never had any expectations of Aboriginal people. Or disadvantaged people generally. That is why it has stepped into their lives to such an extraordinary degree.
Invest in this!
On of my greatest bugbears is the abuse of language, for as the Chinese remind us, when words cease to carry clear and definite meaning, we cannot talk successfully to one another and what needs to be done remains undone.
High on my list of “linguistic abominations to be resisted” is the intellectually lazy language of politicians who are always promising to “invest” in their favourite spending programme. Elect me, they intone, and I will “invest” in (pick any of) health care or pensions, or EI, or welfare, or civil service salaries or innovation (whatever that is, other than doing new things…).
What’s wrong with this language? Investment actually means something quite precise. Here, from a recent issue of The Economist, is a classic definition of what’s at stake:
The goal of economic policy should be to maximise households’ well-being and hence their consumption—but over time, not just today. Consuming too much today will make the next generation poorer. By investing (and saving), a country sacrifices current consumption but future output and consumption will be higher. The optimal level of investment is the rate that generates the highest sustainable level of consumption over time.
So there is an important distinction between consumption and investment. When you consume something, as its name implies, you use it up –it is gone. Consumption is the ultimate end or the objective of all economic activity — we work hard so that we can consume food and clothes and cars and clean air and all the other good things that we want. But to be able to consume successfully *over time*, to be able to enjoy a rising standard of living over the years, we can’t simply use up everything we make today. We have to set aside some portion of what we make today and invest it in long-lived tools that allow us to consume more in future. If we consumed everything we made today, we would enjoy nicer clothes and richer food and more theatre tickets, but because we didn’t save anything to preserve our standard of living over time, soon we’d not be able to afford a car, and we’d have to give up the house and move into an apartment, renting the space we lived in but not building up any equity in it. Our standard of living would decline….
Government is no different. When it takes our tax dollars and spends them on things used up today, such as civil servants’ salaries or social welfare payments or grants to business, they are not investing. They are consuming. There is nothing wrong with consumption, but if we overconsume today and underinvest for tomorrow, the long term consequence is a declining standard of living.
A classic example is infrastructure. For example many of our cities are limping along with infrastructure such as sewers and water mains that are very old — well past their useful life. We have been consuming the investments of our ancestors, but not saving up to replace them — a classic case of enjoying a higher standard of living today at the expense of tomorrow. Underinvesting (because we’re having too good a time consuming today) is very bit as morally reprehensible as long-term deficit financing of public spending, because in both cases we are making our children pay the costs of our decisions. And we’ll only fix that if we challenge politicians about the abuse of language involved whenever they turn consumption today into “investments”. It ain’t so…
Bélanger and Migué on Fearful Symmetry
Economists Gérard Bélanger and Jean-Luc Migué have an interesting piece in the National Post of 5th October arguing against some of the case I make in Fearful Symmetry attributing the rapid growth in government in Canada to a combination of the rise of the Boomer generation and a separatist Quebec nationalism.
One of the main points they raise against my argument is that growth in government was occurring all over the world, and especially in the western world, and therefore to attribute the growth in government in Canada to these two factors in Canada is to miss the larger picture of change affecting all western societies.
This would be a fair criticism, if it were true. But of course it isn’t. Indeed I spent an important part of the book tracing the growth of government spending in Canada, comparing it to our counterparts in the US (with whom we shared almost identical patterns of government growth for over a century, until the 1960s), and demonstrating that there were in fact two “camps” among Western industrialised societies. One was essentially the US, Canada and Australia, the other was much of Western Europe. The first group proved remarkably more resistant to the growth of government than the latter. But Canada in the Sixties and Seventies essentially changed teams. After a century of following in America’s footsteps, we suddenly and brutally changed camps. Over the ensuing few decades, America’s share of GDP devoted to government rose 6 percentage points. Ours rose over 20. As I say in the book, the zeitgeist in favour of larger government no doubt explains part of the growth in Canada. But it is the speed and size of the change over such a short period, that requires supplementary explanation in Canada, especially since the political class remained committed to small and limited government right up until the early 1960s, as I again show in the book.
As for the rise of a separatist Quebec nationalism only emerging in the 1970s, Migué and Bélanger must have lived through a very different history than I did. The Sixties were a time of radical nationalist ferment that was frightening the life out of the political class in Ottawa. The B&B Commission was named in response. The PQ was formed in the late Sixties from the merger of two other separatist political parties that had been agitating for some time. This was the time that mailboxes were blowing up in Montreal and the FLQ was issuing manifestos. Jean Lesage won the 1960s election on a platform of Maîtres chez nous, and Daniel Johnson won the 1966 election on the slogan of Égalité ou indépendence. The federal Liberal Party went and recruited les trois sages (Trudeau, Marchand and Pelletier) in the mid-Sixties as an attempt to strengthen their response and Trudeau was clearly made leader of the party because he was seen as the man able to respond forcefully to what was happening in Quebec, as indeed he did in the FLQ crisis in 1970.
It is historical revisionism pure and simple to say that because the PQ only made its entrée into the National Assembly in 1970 with a quarter of the vote or because the first referendum only occurred in the late Seventies (with half of French-speakers voting to give the government a mandate to negotiate sovereignty-association) that therefore nothing had happened in the decade preceding or that politicians in Quebec City and Ottawa were not already responding to the rise of a separatist nationalism in the province.
Tom Courchene responds, after a fashion
One of Canada’s most respected social thinkers and a man who has been a great inspiration to me personally, Tom Courchene of Queen’s University, wrote an op-ed in The Globe responding to my own. Mine was a summary of some of the arguments in Fearful Symmetry, focused in particular on the recent news that Ottawa was about to expand the number of seats in the Commons to reflect the growth of BC, Alberta and Ontario. Quebec and all the other provinces would gain no seats, implying a relative loss of not only population but political influence as well. Professor Courchene’s article was clearly intended to be a rebuttal to my piece, but like Andrew Coyne and several other readers who wrote to me, I found its arguments to be a bit mystifying.
OK, he spends the first third of the article agreeing with me. But the place where apparently he and I diverge is when I wrote that the shifting distribution of seats was a symptom of a larger malaise, especially for Quebec, which I described as “a society that cannot pay its own way or reproduce itself, that is highly dependent on transfers from the rest of the country, and that is losing its political influence.†Professor Courchene felt called upon to defend Quebec’s honour.
In so doing he said, for example, that while obviously Quebec’s weight would fall in the Commons, it would remain the same in the Senate. True but, as the French say, quel rapport? Is Professor Courchene seriously suggesting that the ultimate backwater in Canadian political institutions, our unelected Senate, will suddenly become the new avenue through which Quebec will exercise the kind of powerful political influence it has enjoyed in recent decades? If that were the case, I think you’d find Senate reform, giving Quebec the same number of seats as all other provinces, would rapidly move up the public agenda. He argues that falling seats in the Commons for Quebec will mean an abandonment by Quebec voters of the Bloc and a return to the fold of one or more federalist parties. But part of the argument I made in my op-ed is that as the Commons expands, and Quebec’s representation remains static, their ability to cause minority governments (as is the case today thanks to the Bloc) or to bestow majorities (as in much of the previous century), will be heavily diluted. It won’t disappear. It will just become less and less decisive. It is just arithmetic. Michael Bliss makes a similar point about Conservative Party electoral fortunes in today’s Globe.
But what really mystified me, coming from the father of the argument about “transfer dependency” which Professor Courchene helped to popularize in Canada in the 70s and 80s, was his attempt to make it appear that Quebec was the source of many highly desirable changes in Canada, most of which were only made possible by big, and badly designed, transfer programmes. Now far be it from me to deny that Quebec has been a valued and welcome member of Confederation, and I agree with him that the legal and linguistic diversity that Canada enjoys is in large part due to our perfectly legitimate efforts to accommodate Quebec and French-speakers. But as Professor Courchene quite well knows, because he has read my book and I have discussed it with him, many of the changes he singles out as gifts Quebec has bestowed on Canada, I argue have been the result of a sordid bidding war between Ottawa and Quebec City to keep Quebeckers from voting to leave Canada. Moreover this bidding war, by putting huge piles of cash on the table for Quebeckers to quarrel over, has created a society deeply mired in rent-seeking, or what I call PUPPETRY (people using political power to enrich themselves by plundering you).
The whole reason that Quebec is losing political and demographic weight is because its vast expansion of the state and its shift from being a society concerned with productive effort to one concerned with PUPPETRY have caused the emergence of that “society that cannot pay its own way or reproduce itself, that is highly dependent on transfers from the rest of the country, and that is losing its political influence.â€
Among the many social dysfunctions that have emerged in Quebec since the Quiet Revolution, let’s list a few: low employment rates, low productivity per capita, low investment rates, low in-migration, low fertility, low family formation rates, high welfare dependency, high out-migration, high taxes, high debt, high divorce, suicide and abortion rates. Now why ever would you describe that as “a society that cannot pay its own way or reproduce itself, that is highly dependent on transfers from the rest of the country, and that is losing its political influenceâ€?
Yes, as Professor Courchene points out, Quebec has been an innovator in social policy, although my gloss on that is that the innovation helps to create dependence on the state and is part of the problem. He cites cheap daycare as an example. On the other hand, that is a policy so far looked on in much of the rest of the country with scepticism, is very expensive and by no means an unalloyed blessing to parents and children, and is only possible in Quebec because of large transfers from other provinces who do not offer such services, when the transfers are supposed to guarantee that less well-off provinces can offer reasonably comparable services to richer ones. I think our history of transfers has been an unhappy one that has fuelled Quebec’s economic and population weakness and Professor Courchene’s defence of them makes him, in my view, a defender of a system that has done Quebec little good and much harm.
He attributes our “multiculturalism” to Quebec. Again, I disagree. In fact multiculturalism was opposed by Quebec as a dilution of their preference for a narrower and old-fashioned two-nation Canada, and the debate over the extent to which cultural minorities should be accommodated has been loudest and most ill-tempered in Quebec, leaving aside the extent to which Quebec has used its provincial powers under the constitution to marginalize the English-speaking population, a stain on Canada’s record of linguistic tolerance and diversity which I document in Fearful Symmetry.
And that brings us to Professor Courchene’s last point: Quebec has been the spear-tip of a movement in favour of “collective rights” that helps to distinguish us from the United States. Well, as a Laurier liberal, a believer in individual liberty, responsibility and accountability under the rule of law, I personally think that “collective rights” are harmful to democracy, are an unwelcome departure from our legal, moral and political tradition, and are unnecessary to distinguish us from the United States. Canadians were different from Americans before e.g. Bill 101 allowed the French-speaking majority in Quebec to oppress the French-speaking minority that wanted to send their kids to English-language schools (an example of how collective rights are really code for majorities oppressing minorities). Surely we only need to distinguish ourselves from American on points where they are wrong and we can do better. Anything else is difference for its own sake, an unworthy prize and one for which we should be unwilling to sacrifice our freedoms and moral tradition.
Fearful Symmetry in La Presse
I was asked by Andre Pratte, the editor in chief of La Presse, to prepare a brief overview of the argument in Fearful Symmetry about how Ottawa should accommodate Quebec in the coming years. Especially because the article (which appeared on Tuesday, 22nd September, 2009) does not appear on-line and is therefore not searchable, I reproduce the article as I originally submitted it below.
La fin de la surenchère
Paru dans La Presse du 22 septembre 2009 (cet article n’est pas disponible à l’Internet)
Par Brian Lee Crowley
La présence simultanée durant les années soixante d’une bulle démographique et d’un mouvement crédible prônant l’indépendance du Québec a déclenché une espèce de surenchère pour capter la loyauté des jeunes Boomers francophones. Des programmes fédéraux visant à rendre les francophones financièrement dépendants envers le Canada furent, par la logique du fédéralisme, généralisés à toutes les provinces.
Il en a résulté un Canada de nouveau composé de deux « nations », mais d’un caractère très diffèrent : une nation qui produit la richesse (‘Making Canada’, composé principalement de l’Ontario, de l’Alberta et de la Colombie-Britannique) et une autre qui la détourne (‘Taking Canada’, composé surtout des autres provinces, mais avec le Québec dans le peloton de tête).
Sans les changements profonds que la Révolution tranquille ainsi que la montée des Boomers ont enclenchés au Québec, le Canada n’aurait pas connu l’expansion démesurée de l’État qu’on constate depuis les années soixante. Cette dynamique est cependant en sérieuse perte de vitesse.
La surenchère opposant Québec et Ottawa a alimenté une croissance démesurée de l’État au Québec qui a, à son tour, miné la croissance économique, approfondi la dépendance d’une certaine couche de la population vis-à -vis de l’État-providence, multiplié les emplois improductifs dans le secteur public, renforcé le pouvoir de chantage des syndicats, des entreprises et d’autres groupes qui cherchent à s’abreuver à la fontaine des deniers publics, affaibli la famille, et encouragé l’émigration toute en décourageant l’immigration. Le poids politique, économique et démographique du Québec s’en est trouvé amenuisé, tout comme sa capacité de poursuivre la surenchère.
Selon Statistiques Canada, en 2031, le Québec représentera à peine 21 % de la population canadienne. Par contre la Colombie-Britannique, l’Alberta et l’Ontario compteront pour les deux tiers de la population et s’accapareront trois fois plus de sièges que le Québec à la Chambre des communes.
Cette coalition (Making Canada) représentera également 70 % de l’économie nationale. Comparée au Québec, sa population, sa natalité, son immigration, sa productivité et son niveau d’emploi seront tous plus élevés alors que son fardeau fiscal et son taux de retraites anticipées seront de beaucoup inférieurs. La pénurie de travailleurs qu’annonce le vieillissement des Boomers rendra cette région du pays de plus en plus réfractaire à participer au financement d’une partie non-négligeable de l’État-providence obèse du Québec.
Il va sans dire qu’un Québec qui représente une cinquième de la population et de l’économie continuera d’être influent, et tous ces développements auront aussi des conséquences positives.
Par exemple, l’invasion par Ottawa de bien des domaines de politique sociale a eu pour mobile la poursuite de la surenchère. Sciemment ou non, le gouvernement fédéral a ainsi fini par subventionner une série de politiques, notamment au Québec, mais ailleurs aussi, qui ont profondément endommagé les économies provinciales.
On pourra résoudre ce problème en mettant fin aux transferts fiscaux et en les remplaçant par un transfert de capacité fiscale. Lorsque les provinces auront à défrayer la note de leurs politiques sociales à partir de leurs propres ressources, elles seront plus attentives aux résultats obtenus.
En contrepartie, les provinces seraient appelées à reconnaître, une fois pour toutes, le rôle prépondérant du fédéral en ce qui a trait à la création d’un marché libre et sans entrave à l’échelle du Canada.
Le Québec s’opposera évidemment à ce renouvellement de la présence d’Ottawa dans la vie des Canadiens. Par contre, sortir Ottawa des politiques sociales de ressort provincial toute en s’enrichissant d’une partie de la capacité fiscale du gouvernement fédéral constituerait une victoire importante vu sous l’angle des revendications traditionnelles du Québec. Tout compte fait, on pourrait assister à un renouvellement du pacte confédératif qui sera dans l’intérêt de tous.
Brian Lee Crowley est auteur de Fearful Symmetry : the fall and rise of Canada’s founding values qui vient de paraître chez Key Porter.
Good intentions are not enough
In a follow up column to his two-part series on Fearful Symmetry, Globe columnist Neil Reynolds talked about the dissenters among his readership:
“In this space last week, economist Brian Lee Crowley advanced his intriguing theory that demographic changes will compel Canada to return to the classic liberal principles of personal responsibility and limited government. A number of readers dissented. “Don’t be so greedy,” one of them wrote. “We have found in our character a generosity that has mandated, by the authority of democratically elected governments, the equitable distribution of wealth among most of our people.”
“He suggested that people who find wisdom in Mr. Crowley’s newly published book, Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values, possess “hard little hearts.” These hard-hearted people, he said, think that economic losers should be made to suffer.”
Neil goes on to cast some doubt on this proposition in his own way. Now let me add my own view that the dissenters have missed the point. If they ever pick up Fearful Symmetry they will discover in it an impassioned plea for a reform of social programmes so that those programmes will stop doing so much harm to the most vulnerable in our society. Good intentions, the desire to help those less fortunate, are laudable impulses. But we too often make the mistake of simply throwing money at the problem through ill-designed social programmes, such as EI and many kinds of provincial social welfare, that end up trapping our most vulnerable citizens in a near-permanent dependence on benefits. In the book I make the case that this is a far worse fate than being a productive member of our society, even in a relatively low-paying job.
Work is one of the key ways in which we develop our humanity, contribute to our community and become free people pursuing our own goals. These are essential elements of the fully human life. When we design social programmes that make that harder to achieve, we are not being “generous” or “caring”. We are being destructive and using tax money as a cheap salve to our inflamed consciences. If you pick up the book you’ll see that I also argue that this view of the centrality of work and the importance of keeping the most vulnerable out of the clutches of the well-meaning welfare state is increasingly accepted across the political spectrum.
