Fearful Symmetry - the Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values. Brian Lee Crowley
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 in a temporary economic dividend from demographic change. This has now evaporated....21
That helps to clarify how we paid for our massive expansion of the state. We borrowed, of course, and ran up an impressive national debt22 in the process as we consumed public services for which we were unwilling to pay commensurate taxes. But just as important was the demographic dividend Foot describes.
Its evaporation coincided with our worsening fiscal position, with our need to improve productivity (which gave birth to free trade with the Americans) as well as with increasing resistance to abusive welfare policies that had allowed many people to escape working. So the first mini-wave of painful adjustment brought us trade opening, the battle to defeat the deficit at both the federal and provincial levels, and a wave of welfare reform at both the provincial23 and federal (Employment Insurance reform and reductions in transfers to the provinces to finance welfare) level. Yet that was during a period when the labour force was still growing faster than the population in general, although the gap had already closed considerably compared to the sixties and seventies. When the next wave of demographic change hits, that first mini-wave of change will look like glory years.
We are already suffering its first early ripples, even though the big wave is still several years away. Starting in 2011, population will grow faster in Canada than the labour force, and that trend will continue for forty years. Already today, after nearly fifty years of the labour force growing by an average of 1 per cent a year every year (and often much more), we are in a period when it is growing at half that rate. By 2016, a few short years away, the number of net new workers entering the workforce will be zero and will be slightly negative for a decade after that. We are teetering on the edge of a demographic cliff, and we have one foot out in the air.24
Help Wanted
Labour shortages on a massive scale are so foreign to the Canadian experience that it may be hard for people to grasp what it may mean. The problem is made even more difficult by the fact that we are in the midst of an economic downturn that is squeezing employment in many parts of the country.
Yet the current slowdown, as painful as it may be, is nothing more than one of the ups and downs that all economies experience from time to time. That’s why it is referred to as a cyclical downturn. Imbalances (in this case too much debt) build up and have to be fixed. But once fixed, we return to growth and almost invariably end up surpassing previous high-water marks of income, employment, and growth. There is little reason to think this downturn will be materially different.
The point here, however, is that a cyclical downturn such as we are experiencing today can temporarily mask much deeper and more profound changes. The coming labour shortages are a good example. The demographic changes that I have described are not cyclical; they are not the result of short-term ups and downs. They are deep changes in the very structure of our population, changes that