Canada

Saturday

Patrick Nolan

What you need to know ahead of the Spending Review: the Canadian experience

This is the latest of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. The first six posts were on health, education, the coalition’s first hundred days, welfare, the Civil Service, and the New Zealand experience. Canada In a forward to Reform’s alternative 2010 Budget, Rt Hon Paul Martin, Canadian Finance Minister from 1993 to 2002 and Prime Minister from 2003 to 2006, noted that when a new Liberal government was elected in Canada at the end of November 1993 the deficit and debt-to-GDP ratios were, with the sole exception of Italy, by far the worst of the G7. In 1998, just 4 years later, Canada’s deficit was no

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Happy Birthday Canada! | 1 July 2010

A shout-out to Canadian friends and readers on this, your national day. Another year passed: another year of peace and prosperity in the northland. Here’s my friend Will Wilkinson writing about how he became an accidental Canadian: As the clock struck midnight on April 17, 2009, the Canadian citizenship of my Saskatchewan-born but subsequently naturalized American father was restored. And thus, thanks to Bill C-37, an amendment to the Canadian Citizenship Act, so was mine. Under its terms, all Canadians who had lost their citizenship when they took on a new nationality—i.e., Canadians like my dad, who became an American in June 1965—regained it, as did their first generation of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

O Canada!

It’s Canada’s birthday today as well! I dare say that there must be unpleasant Canadians but every Canuck I’ve ever met has been lovely. Granted, most of them no longer live in Canda but that’s a mere detail… Canada is one of those countries we rarely hear much about, not merely because it’s over-shadowed by its larger neighbour but because it seems, on the whole, to be a pretty well-run place full of nice people. Consequently Canada has a negative news value. (Scandanavia and New Zealand have, in different ways, some of the same attributes. Good place to live = Boring!). Anyway, the Canadian national anthem is a fine one.

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

The politics of ringfencing

Jean Chrétien, the former Canadian prime minister, has acquired an almost mythic status in certain Tory circles for the way his government cut back public spending in the 1990s. So it’s worth paying attention to his remarks about ringfencing departmental budgets last night. He didn’t quite go so far as to say that withholding the axe would fatally undermine George Osborne’s deficit reduction plan, but he did suggest that it would make the politics of the situation a good deal tricker: “Jean Chrétien, whose tough fiscal tightening programme in the 1990s is seen by the Government as a model for Britain today, warned that everyone always came up with plausible

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Trust Factor

The other day, writing in the New York Times, Tyler Cowen suggested: The received wisdom in the United States is that deep spending cuts are politically impossible. But a number of economically advanced countries, including Sweden, Finland, Canada and, most recently, Ireland, have cut their government budgets when needed. Most relevant, perhaps, is Canada, which cut federal government spending by about 20 percent from 1992 to 1997. […] To be sure, the spending cuts meant fewer government services, most of all for health care, and big cuts in agricultural subsidies. But Canada remained a highly humane society, and American liberals continue to cite it as a beacon of progressive values.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Who’s Afraid of a Hung Parliament?

So it seems you have to vote Conservative to accept the party’s invitation to join the government of Great Britain? Who knew? Tory warnings of the dire consequences of a hung parliament are understandable but, I suspect, unfortunate. There is little evidence that the electorate believes that a hung parliament will be a disaster, far less than they can be cajoled into thinking that they’re letting Britain down if they don’t vote Conservative. And that, my friends, is the underlying message sent by the Tories’ blitz against a hung parliament. A hung election might not be ideal but it might also be a fitting end to this exhausted, depressing parliament.

Sunday

Mark Bathgate

Bring on the serious economic debate

Why does Britain fall for financial spin so often? The question goes well beyond the great confidence trick of Gordon Brown’s ten years in the Treasury. I’m just back from three weeks in Australia. What’s always struck me in the years I’ve gone there is how different the newspapers/news shows/political debates are. They are well informed about macro-economics, and there is much less of the spin/personality culture of the mainstream media in the UK. Canada is exactly the same. Last week, the Canadian budget was published – a very clear and credible path to getting budget back to balance within three years. One of their officials explained to me that

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Cutting public spending, Canadian style

It first aired a couple of nights ago but, as Benedict Brogan says, this ITN news feature on how the Canadian government cut public spending by 20 percent in the late-1990s is well worth watching: P.S. I doubt we’ll be seeing repeats of the hospital demolition which comes at 2:19. P.P.S. Perhaps the most striking part of the film is Tom Bradby’s conclusion: “We [in Britain] are almost certainly going to have to make this journey.  But have British politicians – any of them – really even begun to prepare us?”  Why so striking?  Well, because it’s another sign that the media are countenancing even greater cuts than the politicians

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Putting the “public” into “public spending cuts”

My old colleagues at Reform have put together a very useful analysis of the Canadian spending cuts programme – which got that country’s debt-to-GDP ratio down by 20 percent during the late 1990s – over at Centre Right.  I’d suggest you read the whole thing, but this point deserves repeating: “The key lesson from the Canadian reforms is that, as Andrew Haldenby recently argued, getting the public to support tough measures requires them to feel part of the process. This need for openness with the public contrasts with the approach of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has argued that it would be a mistake for the Government to set departmental

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Big Business & Big Government, Together Again…

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the Scottish government’s desire to set alcohol prices. Not the least of them is that, in addition to the usual health police, the measure is backed by big business. And why wouldn’t it be? The SNP seem to think that Molson Coors’ support for similar measures in Canada and the brewer’s suggestion that the Canadian experience be copied in the UK represents a major breakthrough for the idea. Well, perhaps it does. But Molson Coors is, I think, Canada’s biggest brewer and they also make Carling – the most popular lager in the UK. So of course they recognise that increased

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Time for a British Manley Commission?

If the government wants to stem the haemorrhaging of elite support for NATO’s Afghan mission, there is one major thing it can do at this stage: establish a British version of the Manley Commission. In Canada, ex-Deputy Prime Minister John Manley was asked by the Harper government to take a hard look at Canada’s role is Afghansistan, and lay out a clear plan. Its work effectively rebuilt Canadian support for the war effort. The Brown Government is simply not trusted to give an honest assessment of what is happening on the ground or give the military what it needs. The Defence Secretary is an unknown entity outside of Westminster (and

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Yay Canada!

Poor Canada; forever ignored and when it’s not ignored forever patronised. Except when the Quebeckers become fractious, Canadian politics and life barely merits a mention in either the British or American press. We even tend to overlook the Canucks when the stories of the Great Wars of the twentieth century are told. How soon Vimy Ridge slips from consciousness. But Canada has plenty going for it (even if most of the Canadians I know don’t actually live in Canada). So, three cheers for Fareed Zakaria’s latest Newsweek column: Guess which country, alone in the industrialized world, has not faced a single bank failure, calls for bailouts or government intervention in

Monday

Alex Massie

Message from Ottawa

Andrew Coyne defends Stephen Harper from his critics. Or at least, from some of them: While this laissez-faire, do-nothing government contents itself with spending more than any government in the history of Canada — 25% more, after inflation and population growth, than at the start of the decade — and pumping tens of billions of dollars into the banking system, what Canadians demand is “stimulus.” And stimulus, we all know, in a sophisticated, 21st century economy, can be delivered in only one way: by hiring large numbers of unionized men to dig holes in the ground (see “infrastructure.”) Loosening monetary policy doesn’t count. Tax cuts don’t count. It only counts

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Oh, Canada…

I’d been meaning to blog about the Canadian elections but then realised that, dash it, despite Canada actually being an interesting place stocked with charming, affable people I really didn’t have very much to say beyond, “hmm, Canada is having another election”. The BBC evidently thought so too since the elections didn’t make the 10 o’clock news last night. Poor form, I think. Still, it’s curious that Canada receives almost no foreign coverage, even in Britain where there are, after all, plenty of people with Canadian relatives or connections. Anyway, it seems that Stephen Harper has not quite pulled it off. ie, the Conservatives have improved their position, but are