The 21st Century Belongs to Canada

Laurier's famous prediction was just 100 years too early.

In writing The Canadian Century, Brian Crowley, Jason Clemens, and Niels Veldhuis have done a great service for Canada.

It isn’t just that they have reminded Canadians of the remarkable vision and record of one of our greatest prime ministers, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and shown how his plan for Canada is as relevant and vital to us today as it was in his day. It isn’t just that they tell more comprehensively and more clearly than anyone before them the story of a reforming generation of Canadian politicians. Nor is it just that they paint as detailed and sobering a picture as anyone on either side of the border ever has of the tax, debt, and spending trap which is daily ensnaring our American friends and allies.

What they have done is to go beyond each of these individual stories, weaving them together into a single comprehensive look at the opportunities that await Canada in the twenty-first century. In so doing they reveal something of the genius of Canada. We are neither a boastful nor a prideful people, but we think that we ought to do the right thing, even if it takes us a little while to figure out what that might be. And when we get the bit between our teeth, we see things through.

On the telling of the authors, this portrait of the Canadian character was on full display in what they have called the Redemptive Decade, a fertile period of reform that stretched roughly from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's visionary initiative for a free trade agreement in 1988, to Finance Minister Paul Martin’s tabling in the House of Commons of the first balanced budget in a generation. In between politicians of all stripes wrestled with a host of policy challenges that had been left to fester for far too long.

They reformed entitlement programs such as the Canada Pension Plan and provincial welfare. They balanced budgets. They struggled to bring down debt and taxes. They focused governments on the things they do best; not smaller government for its own sake, but smarter government that was a more effective and less wasteful instrument to promote the well-being of Canadians. They ushered in an era of free trade with the Americans, while reforming the structure of taxes through changes like the GST. In retrospect, as the authors lay it out for us, this group of reformers was an unlikely one. It included Saskatchewan New Democrats, Alberta and Ontario Tories, and BC and New Brunswick Liberals, as well as the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien, egged on by the Reform Party of Preston Manning, and the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney.

Region, party, and ideology took a back seat as they struggled to save Canada from self-imposed decline. And they did so remarkably successfully, creating one of the great fiscal and economic turnarounds the western world has seen in decades. Not a bad story for a country teetering on the brink, as the Wall Street Journal warned in 1995, of honorary membership in the Third World. Since Canadians put their shoulders to the wheel back then we enjoyed a long period of growth greater than all our friends in the other G7 countries and Canada became a destination for world leaders seeking guidance and advice on how to achieve for their own countries what Canadians did for themselves.

What none of us realised at the time, but the authors of this timely and thoughtful book eloquently show, is that we were not the originators of the comprehensive reform program we were unwittingly putting in place. That honour belongs to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the first French-Canadian Prime Minister and a man who saw perhaps better than anyone before or since, the boundless opportunity of Canada and knew just what was necessary to move the opportunity from promise to reality.

Liberty was Laurier’s watch word. A Canada in which people are free – free in thought, word, conscience and action, free under the law, free from arbitrary and overweening government – this was a Canada that would attract the best and brightest from the world over. On that foundation of freedom, Laurier advised that we needed to build responsible public finances, limited but strong and active government that promoted individual responsibility and shunned dependency, and a foreign policy that defended Canada’s interests before anything else.

Now that the authors of The Canadian Century have reminded us of Laurier’s plan, it is easy to see why the actions we took in what they have dubbed the Redemptive Decade brought Sir Wilfrid’s prescriptions to mind. We thought we were just wrestling with the problems of the day, but now we can see that both the problems, and the right way to solve them, are bred into Canada’s deepest history and character.

All of these reforms and the benefits they conferred on Canada, this return to Canada’s roots in Laurier’s plan, might have been enough to give Canada a shot at making the 21st century Canada’s century. But the authors show that in fact our neighbours and long-time friendly competitors, the United States, are also contributing. Their contribution, sadly, is to stumble economically, leaving the field open for Canada to shine. Truth be told, American public finances are in a mess and that mess is deepening. If we want to see what would have become of Canada had we not lived through the difficult changes of our Redemptive Decade, we need look no further than Washington DC where unreformed entitlements and undisciplined borrowing are hobbling America’s power to be a world leader and to outshine Canada on the economic front.

You don’t need to agree with every one of the authors’ prescriptions to be infected by their optimism about Canada’s prospects. They are surely right to say that Canada cannot rest on its laurels from the Redemptive Decade. It would be easy to slip back into persistent government deficits, to allow stimulus spending to endure long after its justification has disappeared, and to fail to achieve for Canada the competitive tax advantage Laurier recommended. On the other hand, perhaps they are too optimistic about the appetite on both sides of the border for the kind of institutional deepening of our bilateral relationship that they recommend, and about Canada’s prospects if we are so closely tied to an America with major economic problems.

Still, it is refreshing and encouraging to see these important policy thinkers in our country pointing out that Canada doesn’t need to take a back seat to anybody, and that our fate lies within our own hands if we have the courage, the energy and the enthusiasm to grasp it. It is not often that Canadians talk about moving out of America’s shadow – for far too long we have simply assumed that being in that shadow was the natural order of things. Crowley, Clemens and Veldhuis remind us that Sir Wilfrid Laurier thought that all things were possible for us, and today they show, with an impressive array of facts to support their argument, that Laurier’s plan for Canada can still carry us through to that Canadian century we have all been eagerly awaiting for over a hundred years.