Professor Osberg is an academic of whom I and many others think very highly. He has also spent decades ably proselytizing for policies I think are deeply mistaken. Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values constitutes a reasoned assault on many of those policies. There is always a temptation, therefore, for the reviewer to use a review like this to promote his own ideas rather than judiciously commenting on the author’s; Professor Osberg may have ceded ever so slightly to this temptation. Readers may thus be somewhat in the dark about what I actually said.
Fearful Symmetry argues that, on balance, the last half-century has deeply damaged Canada, kept a lot of people out of work and dependent on various kinds of government benefit, undermined our work ethic, harmed the integrity of the family and caused a lot of tax-financed waste. This will cause great discomfort among those who hew to the chattering classes’ approved line that the growth in government, welfare, public employment, taxation and debt has ushered in a kinder, gentler Canada. Indeed, I argue that we abandoned many of the traditional behaviours of Canadians to our cost, since the old way of doing things often produced better results for individuals and families than what we have put in their place.
The changes have not been the result of Keynesian philosopher-kings dispensing “social justice,” although there was lots of such self-delusion too. It is rather that the confluence in 1960s Quebec of a separatist-nationalist movement and a huge baby-boom generation looking for work unleashed a bidding war between Ottawa and Quebec City. Both governments tried to win young Quebeckers’ loyalty by creating dependence on various kinds of welfare, subsidies and public employment.
The result, which I document with sadness, not satisfaction, has been havoc wrought on Quebec society at every level, subsidized by all Canadian taxpayers. Most of the rest of the country was less damaged because while Ottawa couldn’t limit its half of the bidding war to Quebec, it didn’t have to spend so liberally elsewhere. Finally, I suggest we can fix this sorry mess while maintaining the integrity of our beloved country, in part because the labour shortages created by population aging will make the behaviour of the last few decades politically unacceptable.
Andrew Coyne says the book is “nothing less than a revolution in our way of looking at Canada, its history and its future.” I leave it to the reader to decide if Osberg or Coyne offers the more compelling account of Fearful Symmetry.
