Post-Economic Politics in Canada

The following is a version of Andrew Coyne’s May 14, 2012 “The LRC Presents…” talk, presented in partnership with TVO’s Big Ideas.

I. The crisis, and after

At the height of the financial crisis, in October of 2008, the finance ministers and central bank governors of the G7 countries gathered in Washington for an emergency session. It was by all accounts an emotional meeting. Banks were collapsing, or on the verge of it, across most of the western world; governments had intervened, but in a haphazard, uncoordinated fashion that only seemed to make things worse; panic was rising. They were staring into the abyss, and they knew it. At one point, the German finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, told a story of an encounter he had had with a woman in East Germany. She had survived the fall of communism, she said, only to have to live through the fall of capitalism. I imagine he thought this would lighten the mood.