Naw, we’re still free. It’s the wonder of a multiparty system that accommodates everything: even the Libertarian Party, the Natural Law Party (we’ll all be fine if we only learn to levitate like Doug Henning), the Communist Party, and the Marxist-Leninist Party all rate a mention in the popular media from time to time. I miss the Rhinoceros Party (“we’re going to repeal the law of gravity”), which is no longer around, but they also made the news occasionally. Freedom of the press is guaranteed in the constitution, and the Canadian press takes full advantage of that right.
My favorite Rhino party policy was their plan to flatten the Rocky Mountains so Alberta could get an extra couple of minutes of daylight.
Canada doesn’t need nearly the same stimulus as the US because their financial sector is in much better shape apparently because there was much less deregulation than in the US. As a corollary there wasn’t a comparable housing bubble in Canada. If Canada faced a crisis comparable to the US I am sure you would see a much bigger stimulus.
One thing I am interested in is how Canada managed to reduce government spending by so much; apparently 10% of GDP in less than a decade. This is much bigger than the reductions in domestic spending by either Reagan or Thatcher . In fact it’s perhaps the biggest reduction in domestic spending ever carried out by a major economy. What exactly was being cut here?
Canada still tops the United States in smugness, as this post more than demonstrates.
I don’t see anything smug about his post.
It’s more obvious when you keep in mind that he’s a Canadian who constantly cheers on far right American politics.
Lots of Canadians are conservative about some issues. This is a free country, and Sam is entitled to his opinions. And quite frankly, a lot of the OP is correct. Our economy IS in good shape as compared to most of the rest of the industrialized world, and it’s in part because the government - under both the Liberal and Conservative parties, I might add - has taken some genuinely conservative (as opposed to Republican) steps in the last fifteen years.
This isn’t so much a smug shot at the USA as it is a commentary about how things have changed in Canada. You could make the same comparison to any number of European states, or the Union itself, which has had the same meldown as the USA.
Free Canada
… with every five gallons
After Mulroney’s two terms in power, the Progressive Conservative party utterly collapsed in the '93 elections. This was in no small part due to the rise of the Reform Party in western Canada and the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec. Each of these upstarts siphoned off huge chunks of former Tory votes. The resulting Parliament gave the Liberals a strong majority with a completely fractured opposition. In the next two elections, no party BUT the Liberals had any chance of forming a government. This gave the Chretien government a pretty much free hand in enacting policies because they were the right policies instead of whatever would make for an easier campaign in 4 years time.
It was also the case that at the time doing something about the ballooning deficits was politically popular. Voters actually recognized that some painful decisions had to be made.
What followed wasn’t vast cuts in government spending, but more like a 6 year freeze on government spending. 6 years in which the economy was growing very rapidly - this was the initial dot com boom. Oh, there were howls about inadequate funding for pretty much every government program you can think of, but in the absence of any real alternative government, Chretien and Martin could ignore them until the deficit was gone at which point they had a huge coup they could wave around…until Adscam, but that’s another story.
Please… twenty litres.
Didn’t we just conclude that experiment last year? You know - the twenty-five year study where the conservatives deregulated the American economy and the liberals regulated the Canadian economy?
I didn’t know we were going to have a rematch. But you might want to think about why we insisted on changing sides.
Please yourself… The English have mutant oversized gallons.
23 liters.
Well, you’re nearer the melting icecaps than we are, so you’ll be underwater first. We’ll trade you land for oil.
No.
Canada’s been more economically conservative than the USA since the mid-90s, anyway. The US federal government has been spending money like it’s going bad tomorrow since Bush became President, whereas Canada started cutting deficits in the 90s and started achieving annual surpluses in (IIRC) 1997. Nor has the economy been particularly “Regulated.” A lot has been made of banking regulations, but over the last 25 years the governments here have been largely getting OUT of economic regulation.
One thing to bear in mind is that with respect to the Canadian federal government, especially as opposed to the US federal government, the leadership of a majority government can do anything it wants, fiscally speaking.
As Gorsnak points out, the Liberals had a run of several election cycles in which they had no unified opposition that could buy votes with elaborate spending promises. But the other thin to bear in mind is that the Westminster system forces backbenchers to vote with the government on passing a budget, since if they don’t pass the budget there’s a new election. That has no equivalent in the U.S. system.
If Barack Obama proposed a budget filled with drastic cuts, the Representatives and Senators who’re most affected by the cuts have to hear it from their constitutents, and will pressure the administration to fund their pet projects and local stakeholders. A Democratic rep from California isn’t going to be kicked out of the Democratic Party or face a snap election because she votes against a budget. So every rep and Senator has some political capital to influence the budget, deals they can make, and it’s invariably in the direction of spending more money on things that will help their district/state. In Canada, most Members of Parliament have no such capital. If the Hon. Member for Upper Butthump Valley doesn’t want to vote with the government, that’s too goddamned bad. Vote with the party, or he’s out of the party and likely out of Parliament in the next election. Our government can’t really function without party discipline; the U.S. government doesn’t need party discipline to function. And of course there is no check on the House of Commons. There’s no President. The Governor-General signs whatever bills are put in fronrt of her (and if she doesn’t, she’d be replaced.) The Senate doesn’t make money decisions. Once the House says “Here’s this year’s budget,” that’s the budget.
Consequently, when the Liberals didn’t face serious opposition from the Loyal Opposition, they could take any fiscal steps they wanted. As long as Jean Chretien and Paul Martin had the political will to slash the budget, they could slash the budget. No person in the American system has, or COULD have, that power. Congress cannot (without an unrealistic majority say-so) force the President to sign anything, nor can the President force the House to pass anything, and no member of Congress can be forced to go along with her/his party’s leadership.
That’s what Mulroney thought too. 
Of course your point about the procedural differences between the US and Canadian systems stands. But it’s not like Parliament isn’t answerable to anyone for its decisions.
Yes, it wasn’t so much that budgets were cut - it’s just that they grew at a pace slower than the pace of economic growth, so the government’s spending as a percentage of GDP went down.
Apart from what Rick mentioned above, one factor in Canadian politics that affects pork spending (or the lack thereof) is the fact that Canada has very strong party discipline - stronger than many other parliamentary governments. While this isn’t always a good thing, one positive effect it has is to give individual members ‘cover’ for policy which goes against their own local constituents’ interest.
In the United States, every congressman and Senator has a free vote on every issue. So if they vote for something that takes money from their own constituents, they’ll be held responsible for it. In Canada, everyone votes the party line on major bills, and therefore aren’t expected to bring home the pork. We also have less NIMBYism for the same reason.
Also, lobbying has more value in the United States, because lobbyists can sway individual votes. So special interests have more influence in the government. Lobbying happens in Canada as well, but it’s of a different nature.
A side issue but after the massive spending of the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations, I think we need to give up on the idea that “economically conservative” equates with less government spending. The two sides of the ideological divide on economics are “tax and spend” vs “borrow and spend”.
I’d be more inclined to suggest that those administrations weren’t economically conservative. Republican doesn’t necessarily mean conservative.
If you’re going to use the word “conservative” with regards to government fiscal policy it doesn’t really makes any sense to make it synonymous with “not conservative.”
Perhaps it looks that way in the United States. But the rest of the world is not the same as the United States.
I’ll concede the point. In other countries, there may be conservatives who are actually working to lower government spending. But here in the United States, the default choices have become the two I mentioned. Claiming that conservatives don’t borrow and spend flys in the face of all the decades of evidence to the contrary. Claiming that real conservatives don’t do this means that there are no conservatives in American government. You have to keep a sense of reality about you and acknowledge where American politics actually is as opposed to where you’d wish it to be.
“New Flor-da” I like the sound of that.