Читать книгу Northern Light: Lessons for America from Canada's Fiscal Fix - Robert P. Murphy - Страница 3

As Canada watches America struggle with the painful state of its public finances we feel not only the concern shared by the entire world, but also a special kinship in the sense that Canada has been there and knows how hard chronic deficits and spiraling debt are to fix.

On the other hand, having been through our own fiscal hell and come out on the other side, we also know it can be done. This book originates from a desire by America’s best friends to give our southern neighbors confidence that there are solutions to their current crisis and that they are completely practical, not theoretical, and will make a difference for the better for America’s future economic prospects. Our message is not only for the American people, who will want to know that such a mess in public finances can be repaired without giving up the most valuable things government does. Our message is equally addressed to the American political class: Done right, putting America’s fiscal house in order can be politically popular too. All the governments in Canada that took this problem on and solved it, whether national or provincial, were handsomely re-elected by a grateful public.

When we created the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Canada’s national public policy think tank, two and a half years ago, Canadians themselves were unaware of the remarkable story of how our country had turned the ship of state around just at the moment that it was about to founder on the shoals of fiscal profligacy. And Canada succeeded so well that it enjoyed a remarkable decade of economic growth as a result, paid down considerable debt, saw its job growth rise, and then was able to weather the recent recession better than almost any other industrialized country.

My inestimable co-authors Jason Clemens and Niels Veldhuis and I therefore wrote a book to piece it together for our fellow Canadians, reviewing the reforms in detail and putting them in the context of Canada’s long tradition of fiscal discipline and how the abandonment of that tradition had gotten us into the mess in the first place. That book, The Canadian Century, was an immediate hit: Not only was it a national bestseller in Canada (almost unheard of for a think tank book), but it won the Atlas Economic Research Foundation’s Sir Antony Fisher Prize for excellence in think tank publications. This is the most prestigious global prize in the think tank world and won against competition from institutes in scores of countries around the world.

Given the clamor we then faced from American audiences to come and tell the story of how Canada overcame a quarter century of reliance on burgeoning deficits, we swiftly came to the realization that Americans too wanted to know Canada’s story. Since a major part of the Canadian story is how we could not solve this problem until we stopped regarding it as a matter of partisan contention and began to see it as a matter of our vital national interest, we thought the best moment to tell the story was at the beginning of the 2012 election campaign. We aim not to influence the election’s outcome, but to affect the thinking of America’s electorate and its politicians, across all partisan divisions, by showing how Canada met and bested public finances that were consuming the country they were supposed to be serving.

That is the genesis of Northern Light, which we (my co-authors and I, as well as all our research, editorial, and communications team at the institute, including especially Jason Clemens, Philip Cross, Rachael Fajardo, and Monica Thomas) worked hard to get ready for Labor Day 2012. We are honored that one of our most prestigious peers in the Washington think tank firmament, the American Enterprise Institute, enthusiastically accepted our invitation to partner with us on a launch event in Washington, featuring speakers from across Canada’s political spectrum, all of whom made a signal contribution to putting Canada on the road to strong public finances, including the man who led the effort, former federal finance minister and prime minister, Rt. Hon. Paul Martin. We are grateful to the Donner Canadian Foundation for their support of this project, just as we gratefully recognize the permission we received from Jason Clemens and Niels Veldhuis to use some of the ideas and words originally found in The Canadian Century.

No two countries or historical moments are identical, and it is up to Americans to judge whether Canada’s experience is applicable to their current circumstances. What we can say without fear of contradiction, however, is that there is no one in the world who wishes America recovery and continued success more fervently than your neighbors to the north. If Canada’s experience can help to cast even a small amount of light on the difficult path you will be called upon to tread, and if the success we enjoyed as a result of our efforts can help give you hope that the game will be worth the candle, then we will feel we have accomplished all that a good neighbor can.

Brian Lee Crowley, Managing Director

Macdonald-Laurier Institute

August 16, 2012