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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Friday, June 25, 2004 :::
I have some idea how Canada's election on Monday is going to turn out. What I'm wondering is, how is Canada's September election going to turn out?
If you really want to know what's going on up there, you should check Colby Cosh or Andrew Coyne. But it looks probable that the Conservatives will win fewer than half of the seats and that the ruling Liberals and the socialist NDP combined will win fewer than half of the seats. That leave the Bloc Québecois. The leader of the Conservatives has already pledged not to form a coalition with them; he says that if he becomes the PM of a minority government, he'll form issue-by-issue coalitions -- if he can actually pull that off, more power to him, but unless he's very close to a majority, that strikes me as skating on thin ice. But he knows parliamentary politics better than I do.
Regarding Dean's quip about the size of Canada's economy "if Canada were an independent country", Conrad Black wrote the following in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal:What makes them Canadian are their generous social programs, relatively (to the U.S.) high taxes to pay for them, and the endless repetition of the mantra that Canadians are not Americans, despite being practically indistinguishable from Americans from northern states. Canada is inundated with American popular culture, large numbers of talented Canadians steadily emigrate to larger opportunities and lower taxes in the U.S., and more than 85% of Canada's foreign trade, about 43% of GDP, is trade with the U.S.
Canada is probably more closely integrated with the American economy than is the state of California. None of this inhibits the independent fantasies of most Canadians, but they distinguish themselves from the U.S. in relatively gentle terms compared to what Americans are used to hearing from most other countries. Emphasis added. Regarding the first sentence of that excerpt, I once told a Brit that I thought the main difference between Americans and Canadians is that Americans are proud that they're American while Canadians are proud that they aren't. He thought that sounded about right.
::: posted by Steven at 8:11 PM
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