In my last column of the year, I consigned 2023 to the trash can of history with a gloomy declaration that things are bad and getting worse, and a wish for a Happy New Year where Canadians start demanding better policy instead of watching our politicians drift into disaster. And I kick off 2024 by calling my own bluff about admitting we’re in trouble, then making “a New Year’s list of resolutions… that contains five key policy areas and the things you won’t tolerate politicians doing and those you really want them to do,” with my five areas being national defence, finances, the economy, health care, and regulation.
Security comes first because if you cannot protect your citizens and your political system, nothing else matters. The internet has not persuaded me that Charles de Gaulle said, “There will always be an army in your country. If it is not yours it will be someone else’s.” But he should have. And we need politicians who know why.
Not just talkers. Ones who double military spending, so small it’s no longer a separate budget item but seems to be around $28 billion. Raise it to $56 billion. And put extra money into CSIS and the RCMP’s security threat departments, from espionage to money laundering.
Next come the national finances, because an insolvent government can’t do anything, including defence. And some people may already be groaning that we can’t possibly put another $28 billion into defence when spending already skyrocketed from $296 billion in 2015–16 to $628 billion in 2020–21, before declining to $493 billion in 2021–22. But since they can always find money for vanity projects, surely out of that $200 billion increase roughly one-eighth could go to defending ourselves.
Of course, if we don’t stop forcing wokeness on the military as part of the weird process whereby government, instead of reflecting the popular will is constantly being captured by zealots wanting to use the police power to force their fellows to do stuff they don’t want to, recruiting will be impossible anyway. But five things at a time.
Including cries of whoa, is Robson out of his fiscal mind? Does he propose larger deficits, more printing of money, or higher taxes?
No. I want spending cuts to vast counterproductive social programs and shrinking a bureaucracy whose numbers and cost exploded along with its competence and morale. And now the entire electorate is rummaging through the garage for pitchforks and torches. But if we are not to slide into disaster, we can no longer tolerate bold calls for changes in policy direction of less than half a degree.
Ideally we’d start each budget by deciding how much we could afford overall in the coming year. Then we’d decide how much to put into the vital government functions of supressing force and fraud against the populace from without and within. Finally we’d allocate whatever’s left to what seems most important, instead of deeming all existing programs crucial, adding more absurdly ambitious ones, and printing fake money.
If not, then yes, let’s at least take the pledge on borrowing. If we insist on having programs, let’s pay for them in real time, an approach with the painful merit of forcing us to confront just how big we’ve let government become. And for what? What is it doing right?
Which brings me to the economy. But not some dazzling new intervention to make us wealthy as well as healthy and wise. The state cannot create wealth directly and shouldn’t try. Its job is to create the conditions in which free people create wealth. So we need to eliminate all tax breaks (yes, including for charity) and subsidies, create a one-page income tax form, and stage a bonfire of the regulations.
I’m not into that kluge where you must repeal one old regulation for every new one you spew. Clever bureaucrats would simply write longer, more unfocused ones. We need to rely less on regulation, and more on common sense and common law.
To show how it might work in one key area, let’s repeal the Canada Health Act, replace it with nothing, eliminate all health transfers, and make the provinces laboratories of democracy and fiscal responsibility. Let freedom reign, and private charity.
As for regulation more generally, we must ditch the prevalent tacit notion that Canadians are cute, incompetent, and often malevolent, and must be minutely regulated in everything we do from buying booze to milking cows. We need a revolution in political culture where the state stops trying to transform the human condition while bungling every practical task. We must sweep away marketing boards, housing subsidies, and ten thousand other petty counterproductive measures and the thinking behind them.
If not, well, 2024 will leave us nostalgic for 2023. And not in a good way.
