If you ask people what's wrong with government in Canada today you'll get an earful. Even from people who generally believe in principle that the state can and should do great things for us. If you ask for ideas to fix it, the other ear will get filled with ideas ranging from the obvious to the brilliant to the … eccentric. If you ask what good things have been done, you won't need a third ear because you'll get silence. Why is that?
I ask especially because I've just been at a "Restoring the Alberta Advantage" conference in Calgary. Which wasn't really about Alberta but about how to make government less burdensome and more effective while getting rid of ominous deficits. And for the most part the answers were both obvious and familiar.
Alberta currently has about the worst problems in Canada in this respect, which is not familiar. But its problems are; they are very much like those of other provinces and territories and the federal government because whatever "Alberta Advantage" of inherently smaller government once existed vanished long ago. And if it's really hard to put sensible policies back in place even here, it cries out for explanation.
Our conference was outstanding, with all sorts of important ideas about simplifying the tax system, streamlining regulations, improving municipal government, fixing health care and so on. But most of them were familiar in outline even if some participants brought important new details about how to implement them. And this familiarity is both good and bad.
It's good because, as I just wrote in the National Post, it means we do understand what can be done and should be. But it's bad because it has to be repeated again and again instead of being explained and then implemented. Which is also more than a bit weird.
The point of the conference was not to find something no one ever thought of before. It was to make clear what the available tools were for fixing the problem so politicians and citizens could get serious about using them. And we succeeded if you ask me.
Maybe you shouldn't, because I was one of the organizers and there's a reason we don't let students grade their own work. But one big disappointment about the event was how few current or aspiring politicians attended. You'd think they'd care about this stuff.
You'd think politicians would care a great deal that it's extraordinarily hard to get even the most basic reforms passed. And you'd think it would especially concern those politicians who believe in big government and whose careers hang in the balance if they can't make it work better. And yet them seem singularly uncurious about how to make it more effective and less expensive or why it's hard to fix.
I remain very much interested in good policy ideas, as I have been since my days at the Fraser Institute in… well, never mind how long ago it was. Except to underline my point that we've had a pretty good idea of what needs doing for quite a while now. But I increasingly think our attention should be directed less to what needs to be done than why it is so hard to do.
To give another example, I'm on the C.D. Howe Institute's mailing list. (And full disclosure: my brother runs the place.) And I get all sorts of notices from them about problems in government, from which I especially underline things like unfunded pension and health care liabilities, and what needs to be done.
Like a great many other people, when I get these things I nod my head and think yup, that's an issue. I have no doubt that C.D. Howe and its researchers (like those at the Fraser Institute, the Frontier Centre, the Montreal Economic Institute, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, AIMS and others) have done their homework and done it properly. They get their facts right, their logic is generally sound, their speculations usually plausible. But like a great many other people, I don't expect these studies to have any impact.
Even when they expose a cavernous weakness in public finances that ought to concern those in power above anyone else, I know that if the authorities deign to respond it will be with a pompous denial that any such thing could be happening with them in charge. And they will mean it.
They will mean it even though their own continued tenure in office depends upon recognizing that it is happening, because major fiscal disasters on your watch are a sure ticket to defeat in the next election. They will mean it even though they face daily public relations as well as administrative headaches from the unnecessarily poor performance of government. And they will be loudly seconded and quietly funded by vested interests, material and ideological, who benefit from inefficiencies and injustices in programs big and small. Every existing program, from a broad social program to a boutique tax credit, has a political constituency. And it knows on which side its bread is buttered.
Indeed, they continue to proliferate. As Andrew Coyne just acidly wrote in the National Post, in Ontario "Distribution and sales of marijuana, after it has been legalized, will be carried out via a chain of special-purpose stores operated by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario and staffed by members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, thus fulfilling two key objectives of legalization: more money for the LCBO, and more members for OPSEU."
There are people who actually think the current problems with implementing sound policy are good things. But surely the rest of us don't. Even the fabled millennials who may have voted for Justin Trudeau but, according to polls, distrust government at least as much as the most crotchety of aging Boomers.
After listening to the Calgary presentations I can say with some certainty that governments across Canada have major problems that can only be solved by finding ways to reform even programs with entrenched material and ideological defenders. And also that these readily available tools attract far too little attention even from those in most desperate and urgent need of them.
So let us insist on the proverbial adult conversation about what tools we know are available, and necessary, to fix major governmental fiscal problems and, crucially, about why it is so hard to make sensible use of those tools.
