[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by Ironhorse

Pretty much.

Budget deficits don’t matter because Canadians are no longer serious people. Our expectations of what government should deliver vastly exceeds our willingness to pay for it. And we blame everyone but ourselves.

This column captures the country’s current zeitgeist:

…It’s hard to pinpoint the beginning of the slide, but gradually over the course of the mid-2000s the list of policy failures began to strongly outweigh the list of successes. For instance, we allowed public services (both federal and provincial) to atrophy to the point where they were clearly inadequate to take on complex challenges like the pandemic. No effort was really made to try to bend the cost curve in health care, which was rising at 6 or 7% per year. Why bother, when provinces could blame the federal government for “underfunding” even though expenditures were rising far faster than inflation? Despite promising developments in post-secondary education and research, we chose to reduce real public funding to those sectors, freeze domestic tuition fees and rely instead on international student dollars to fund the system. And the less said about our attention to basic issues of adequate housing support and functioning public transport systems the better…

Why did it all happen?

Maybe it was because we grew tired of austerity. Maybe it was because the country wasn’t facing an existential threat from Quebec anymore. Or maybe it was because, in the mid-2000s, with wheat at $10/bushel, oil at $100/barrel and gold at $1000/ounce, money was pouring into government coffers and we all felt unimaginably rich (remember the summer of 2006, when the dollar was at $1.10 US and it felt like you were losing money every second you weren’t at a Nordstrom on the other side of the border? Good times, if brief). Whatever the cause, all the things that made us “cool Canada” started to go into reverse.

For many years, thanks to the commodity boom, we thought we were richer than we actually were. So we awarded ourselves tax cuts under Conservative governments — the most egregious of which by far was the two-point cut to the GST in 2006 — and higher levels of social benefits under Liberal ones. Always in the name of “affordability” or “middle-class living standards.” Little by little, the policy bias increasingly came to favour jam today over jam tomorrow, and individual pocket-books over the long-term health of systems and institutions.

Meanwhile, the commodity boom slipped away and we found we had not done the work to prepare for anything to come after it. Cue five years of flat-lining growth, followed by panicky multi-billion dollar subsidies for foreign battery plants to pretend we had a plan all along.

We now see where this has led us: dysfunctional government, unaffordable cities, economic stagnation, post-secondary institutions reliant on funding from India, and a foreign policy manifestly unfit for the increasingly dangerous world we now live in.

Twenty years ago, we were a serious country, which met challenges in a serious way. Today, we are but a shadow of that country…

We can blame politicians if we like. Lord knows there is enough blame to go around. But fundamentally the problem is us. Canadians. It’s not that we are incapable of dealing with big challenges: our return from the brink 30 years ago proves that we can. But instinctively, we seem to shirk from challenges and hard choices until is absolutely necessary to make them. We have come to dislike talking about trade-offs. And over time, we have come to reward the politicians who tell us that they do not exist.The politicians who know how much we love fleece…

https://paulwells.substack.com/p/com...elves-to-death

I’m not optimistic that any genuine systemic reform will happen until we’re waist-deep in a fiscal crisis. The health care capacity crunch earlier this year is just a taste of what we have in store for us.