Is Canada's Economy a Model for America's?
By Mark Steyn
Reviewed by David T. Jones, co-author of Uneasy Neighbo(u)rs, a book on U.S.-Canada relations

Text: www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2008&month=01

Often it is as important to know the credentials of the author/speaker as it is to examine the text. Mark Steyn has become one of the stormy petrels of the contemporary political right. A Canadian citizen currently living in New Hampshire, Steyn writes for papers in Canada, the United States, and other global markets, and is a columnist for National Review. He is also the author of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, an extended, critical description of Islamic demographic and social development that he portrays as invidious to Western culture. His criticisms, excerpted in Canada's Maclean's weekly news magazine, so outraged Canadian Islamists that they have charged Steyn in several provincial human rights tribunals with disseminating hate literature. (Canada's position on what would be vigorous free speech in the United States has its own human rights implications.)

In his speech at Hillsdale College, Steyn essentially argues that "not only is Canada's [economy] not a model for America, it's not a viable model for Canada." In support of this conclusion, he notes: Canada's heavier unionization (more civil servants in Quebec than in California); its greater protection (a foreigner cannot own a book store in Canada); greater subsidies for elements of the Canadian economy; more central planning; and heavier taxation. His most pointed criticism of the U.S. economy is agricultural subsidies that benefit the very wealthy — including some wealthy Canadians. More generally, he argues that the Canadian economy has been successful due to the instant availability of the U.S. market.

Regarding the shibboleth of Canadian health care, Steyn suggests that the system works inter alia because U.S. hospitals are available to take care of Canadian emergencies. He derides extended waits for surgery and cites the example of quadruplets delivered in Montana since there were no neonatal beds available in Canada.

More basically, Steyn returns to the demographic arguments he has explored in America Alone. Canadian population growth stems from immigration because "native Canadians" are not having enough children. For Steyn the future belongs to "those who show up for it" — and these are increasingly not Canadians.