Fearful Symmetry - the Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values

Brian Lee Crowley

Description

In the 1960s, Canada began a seismic shift away from the core policies and values upon which the country had been built. A nation of "makers" transformed itself into a nation of "takers". Crowley argues that the time has come for the pendulum to swing back - back to a time when Canadians were less willing to rely on the state for support; when people went where the work was rather than waiting for the work to come to them.

Thought-provoking, meticulously detailed and ultimately polarizing, Fearful Symmetry is required reading for anyone who is interested in where this country began, where it's been, and where it's going.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 27 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456605520
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Fearful Symmetry
 
 
“A bracing, relentless argument for a ‘character shift’ that will release Canada from its torpor.”
—William Thorsell, CEO, Royal Ontario Museum
 
“This book’s expose of some of the sources of Canada’s rush to the left of the United States; of the fact that the chief motives for it are obsolete; and its prediction of a traditional revival, make a stimulating read. The pursuit of a kinder and gentler Canada compared to the US will give way as a national mission to something more galvanizing, as did the preceding inspiration of Imperial solidarity. This excellent analysis by a distinguished and original public policy expert is a fine effort to map out the next national raison d’être .”
—Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
 
“ Fearful Symmetry is one of the most important analyses yet written of the recent history and directions of Canadian public policy. It will undoubtedly be required reading for politicians, civil servants, all possible policy wonks, students, and everyone else concerned about our country’s recent past and its uncertain future.”
—Michael Bliss, Right Honourable Men
 
“A blockbuster! To be Canadian once meant standing up for individual freedom and responsibility; marriage, family, and work. Today, according to Brian Crowley, we’re a nation of ‘rent-seekers,’ political opportunists and lobbyists, ever looking for someone else to take charge, to pay the bills, to tell us what to do. How did this happen? In a compelling account of economic and political developments from the 1960s to the present, Crowley argues that big government inevitably corrupts identity and mores. But the die isn’t cast. Big government isn’t obligatory. Crowley’s last chapters set out reasons for thinking that Canadians may yet recover their former and better selves! Fearful Symmetry will be an eye opener for the political scientists and sociologists who still believe that the Canadian propensity to depend on governments is bred in the bone and shaped Confederation.”
—Janet Ajzenstat, The Canadian Founding
 
“A genuine cri de coeur … Fearful Symmetry provides a fascinating account of the demographic forces transforming Canada and does so with a deep appreciation of the historical trends and political forces that have shaped the Canadian nation. This is a book that is required reading for every informed citizen.”
—Rudyard Griffiths, Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto
 
“In a forthright manner, clearly expressed and with plenty of hard facts, Crowley’s Fearful Symmetry is like an up-to-date national looking-glass into which all responsible citizens ought to peer. There they will find well-grounded political and economic analyses of such as Canada’s worrisome fertility crisis, the debilitating effect (on Quebec as well as on Canada) of Quebec’s quixotic role in confederation, the effects of immigration, population movements within Canada, the reasons for regional disparities, and much more. It is refreshing to have in one’s hands a book that helps us understand where we came from, the mistakes we have made, and how to chart a more certain course for the future.”
—William Gairdner, The Trouble with Canada
 
“You’ll never see the big picture by looking through the microscope of a single academic specialty. That’s one lesson of this important book. Drawing on history, economics, political science, demography, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, even poetry, Crowley constructs an insightful new interpretation of Canada’s still recent shift to Big Government and the ‘fearful symmetry’ of the coming shift back to its more classically liberal origins. Many new and surprising connections are drawn and in the process many a conventional wisdom bites the dust.
Do you love Big Government? Look here for compelling reasons—moral reasons—to reconsider. Do you dislike Big Government but despair of its seemingly unending growth? Find here new reasons for cautious optimism. Do you simply seek to understand the particular trajectories of Big Government in Canada? Seek no further. A must read!”
—Ranier Knopff, University of Calgary
 
“Crowley has not only captured and crystallized some of the most critical conundrums facing the Canadian body politic, he has also provided a path out of our present policy perdition. One doesn’t need to agree (though I mostly do) with his prescriptions to benefit from his clarity of thought.”
—Ken Boessenkool, Research Fellow, The School of Public Policy,
University of Calgary
 
“This book will change the way I think about our politics and the very nature of Canada.”
—Dr. Drew Bethune, Department of Surgery, Dalhousie University
 


 
 
BRIAN LEE CROWLEY
 
fearful symmetry
the rise and fall of canada’s founding values
 


Copyright © 2011 Brian Lee Crowley
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0552-0
 
All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M6B 3A9.
 

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
 
Crowley, Brian Lee
Fearful symmetry : the fall and rise of Canada’s founding values
/ Brian Lee Crowley.
 
ISBN 978-1-55470-188-9
 
1. Canada—History—1963-. 2. Public welfare—Canada—History.
3. Nationalism—Québec (Province)—History. 4. Canada—Social policy.
5. Canada—Economic policy—1945-. 6. Welfare state—Canada—History.
6. I. Title.
  HC115.C765 2009 971.064 C2009-901422-X

 
This e-book edition published by:
Macdonald-Laurier Institute
8 York Street, Suite 200
Ottawa, ON K1N 5S6
 
www.macdonaldlaurier.ca
 
Text design: Sonya V. Thursby
Electronic formatting: Sonya V. Thursby
 


 
 
For Shelley, who knew I could
when I thought I couldn’t
 
 

 
 
THE TYGER
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
—William Blake
 
foreword andrew coyne
 
 
I first met Brian Crowley when we were studying at the London School of Economics together, back in the 1980s. He had come over to do his Ph.D. on Friedrich Hayek, the great free-market theorist and contender, along with Friedman and Keynes, for the title of most influential economist of the twentieth century. As a good social democrat—for so he then was—Crowley had set himself the ambitious task of debunking Hayek. But in the course of his research, he had found himself at first unable to answer his arguments, and at last persuaded by them. In a word, he had become a convert.
Whatever that tells us about the power of Hayek’s analysis, I think it tells us something essential about the author of this profoundly important book: his intellectual honesty; his unblinking openness to facts and reasoned arguments, even those that contradict his preconceptions; above all his fearlessness. He will go where the argument leads him, and let the chips fall where they may. And where it leads him, in the present case, is nothing less than a revolution in our way of looking at Canada, its history, and its future.
That’s “revolution,” in its original sense: as a turning full circle, a return to what once was. It is Crowley’s contention that Canada is about to complete such a revolution—that after fifty years of ever-expanding government, spending, and taxation, we are entering an equally lengthy cycle in which all of these processes will be reversed: beneficially, necessarily, inevitably, as the tides. If the first part of the book is concerned with describing how the tide came in—how the all-providing, ever-encroaching state came to be, with all of its baleful effects on work, on family, on our very souls—the second is spent in happy contemplation of the departing tide, and the rediscovery of those historic virtues of limited government, hard work, and familial commitment on which the country was founded.
For in truth it is the last fifty years, he argues, that have been the aberration. Though mythologized by nationalists as the outgrowth of an inborn cultural bias toward big government that marked us apart from the Americans, Crowley argues convincingly that the growth of the state in Canada had more prosaic origins. Rather, he says, it grew out of the confluence of two separate but not unrelated trends: the explosive growth in the labour force as the “baby boom” cohort reached working age, and the growing threat of Quebec separatism. Beginning in the early 1960s, each set off a kind of panic in policy makers: the first, that the labour market would not prove able to absorb all these newcomers; the second, that the new generation of nationalist francophones in Quebec would carry the province out of the country—not least if Canada could not find work for them.
It was debatable whether either threat was as real as all that. Labour markets are marvellously adaptable things, and separation, as we have learned, is massively difficult, if not impossible to carry off. The point is that policy makers believed they were real. And through the decades that followed, events seemed to validate their concerns. Unemployment was the defining issue of economic policy for most of the period under study, while separatism seemed to reach new peaks with each wave of the political cycle—though whether either flourished in spite of or because of the policies intended to alleviate them is another matter.
What to do with all those young workers was not a preoccupation limited to Canada, of course. Across the developed world, governments wrestled with t