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1/ I want to test a take here, and hopefully those better-informed among you can challenge me on it if it is wrong. It's about how Canadians and their governments have thought about economic growth over the past 50 years.
2/ Back in the 70s + early 80s, as growth stalled & inflation rose, the response was garden-variety Keynesianism: borrow our way through the recession. Through the 80s we kept borrowing, but privatization & lower taxes were what was going to restore growth.
3/ By the mid-90s it became pretty clear neither of those things were working and so, as the 90s went on, Cdn govts gradually started to take the notion of the knowledge-based economy (KBE) seriously and made historic investments in research & PSE generally.
4/ But then we hit the commodity boom. Early 2000s, China joins WTO and we get a world-historic rise in demand for resources. Wheat goes above $10/bushel, oil above $100/barrel, gold above $1000/oz. Chimps could run our economy with those numbers. Of course we went for it.
5/ With a short blip in 2008-9, this boom got us through to about 2014. And then it was gone. It was part of the reason Harper got tossed in 2015. But no party has since been able to articulate what a post-commodity boom model of growth looks like.
6/ The Liberal agenda has essentially been i) borrowing for infrastructure (warmed over 70s ) plus ii) a weak wave in the direction of the 90s-00s KBE strategy (eg Superclusters). The Conservative agenda has been mostly about hoping the resource boom would magically return.
7/ And this is where we are now: not just with no policy but genuinely no deep thought about how growth occurs. We don't even have the building blocks for good policy right now.
