New Decade, Old Canada?

Brian Lee Crowley predicts a return to Canada's founding values

Four days into 2010, many Canadians are likely growing tired of predictions for the new decade.

But in the Halifax Chronicle Herald, Brian Lee Crowley offers one that Canadian conservatives should find encouraging, and will likely leave Canadian progressives worried indeed.

"Canada stands at a hinge of history," Crowley says. "Many of the things we have regarded as settled about Canada since 1960 will be called into question."

As Crowley opines in Fearful Symmetry, issues of employment have been key to the rise of a progressive character in Canadian politics, and employment will be key to turning the tide. Writing about the notion of "pseudo-work" -- the implementation of what was essentially part-time work as full-time jobs in order to employ individuals that the government was worried the free market couldn't employ -- Crowley predicts the return of labour shortages, and the need to restructure Canadian policy in order to account for a situation in which a large population of pensioneers will need to be cared for by younger Canadians.

Immigration will provide Canada with the opportunity to fill jobs that would otherwise remain vacant, but a lack of suitable immigrants could force economic retraction.

"Every Canadian who wants to work will be able to do so," Crowley predicts. "Growth in the economy will slow because we won’t be able to find enough workers. Unemployment in places like Nova Scotia will be negligible and we will be desperately recruiting new workers wherever we can find them."

Crowley argues that Nova Scotia will be particularly well-positioned to take advantage of the historical opportunity.

"If we reduce the size of government, make our taxes competitive (as New Brunswick has been working hard to do for several years), discourage premature retirement, and make ourselves more welcoming to immigrants, I think that the region will fare quite well, and the image Canadians have in other parts of the country will quickly change."

"If, on the other hand, we refuse to change our own behaviour, wring our hands, claim that the rest of the country must bail us out from the difficult circumstances headed our way, we will not get the benefits that these changes could bring."

What Crowley says about Nova Scotia will apply to all of Canada's Provinces -- including Quebec and Ontario.

Crowley's words should also temper many of the Canadians who continually provoke hostility toward the United States as an ideological ploy. He suggests that the differences between the founding values of the United States are not so different from the founding values of Canada.

"We have been sold a bill of goods about the nature of the differences," he says. "For our first century, Canada as a society was more committed than America to the ideals of personal freedom and individual responsibility."

If Crowley's prediction comes true, it will end the days in which left-wing ideologues believes they could treat conservative Canadians as if they were less Canadian. Some ideologues like Michael Byers have suggested drastic action in the present to prevent such a re-transformation from manifesting electorally.

"Most Canadians will feel vindicated and encouraged that the things they have believed in all these years in fact have an impeccable Canadian pedigree," he explains. "Returning to those values will make us more Canadian, not less."

The very notion of that could prove to be a nightmare for Canada's varying left-wing demagogues.