Stephen Harper has finally chimed in on our present crisis. Susan Delacourt writes:
True to his convictions, born in the time of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Harper makes the case that government will have to shrink when this spending splurge is over. Or, in Thatcher’s immortal words, there is no such thing as society when the bills start coming in. That’s when we’ll need the markets again.
“Right now, as in wartime, we face extreme needs for physical and financial security,” Harper writes. “But as needs shift to jobs, growth and wealth creation — and those needs will be enormous — it will require more market activity and a bigger private sector, not more intervention and bigger government.”
Harper hates big government. Not so big business. And, when he was prime minister -- in 2008 -- big business got the lion's share of support:
“Too big to fail” was the signature line of the 2008 crash. Big in that case wasn’t big government, but the titans of industry, whose rescue, it was assumed, would save all those who depended on them. Not all of that worked out as planned.
Canada’s bruising lesson on this score came in the recent shutdown of GM’s Oshawa plant, 10 years after the federal and Ontario governments threw $9.5 billion (U.S.) in aid to the carmaker to keep thousands employed.
The Trudeau government is taking a different tack -- partly because Chrystia Freeland is Deputy Prime Minister. And she has written about the 2008 crisis:
Freeland, in her previous life as a journalist, wrote about the mistakes of the bailouts a decade ago, in a 2012 Reuters opinion piece, about a year before she made the leap into politics.
Freeland’s column appeared in the New York Times and recounted a conversation she had with Amir Sufi, a professor at the University of Chicago Business School, about how the 2008 bailouts were aimed too high up in the economic food chain.
“He believes the U.S. government made a costly mistake by focusing on bankers and not homeowners,” Freeland wrote. And then she added, prophetically. ”Mr. Sufi’s argument matters, and not just because there will, inevitably, be another financial crisis.”
Freeland probably didn’t expect to be sitting in the driver’s seat in any government the next time a financial crisis rolled around, but you can see evidence of her thinking and reporting on it throughout this pandemic.
It appears that Harper has learned nothing from 2008. Neither has his party.
Image: The Toronto Star
