Customarily, political books come with one or two quotes of advance praise from well-known writers. In the case of Brian Lee Crowley's Fearful Symmetry, we behold a multitude. The book's entry on the market teems with lavish endorsements from Canada's conservative cardinals: David Frum, Tom Flanagan, Andrew Coyne, Michael Bliss, Conrad Black, Ken Boessenkool, Jack Granatstein, William Gairdner and others.
They're enraptured. Fearful Symmetry is brilliantly original, they say. It's a blockbuster, a must-read, a national looking glass, and, to be sure, it will change our thinking about Canada.
Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values, by Brian Lee Crowley, Key Porter, 359 pages, $34.95
In fact, it might. It will certainly, if widely read, stir resentment toward Quebec. A central theme of the book is that we've all been had by that province. Quebec sovereigntists repeatedly blackmailed Ottawa over an extended period when the baby-boom generation was flooding the job market. The blackmailing, in combination with a perceived need to accommodate all the new job seekers, brought on a rash of subsidies and benefits and pseudo-employment that changed the character of our governance. Led by Quebec, Canada was transformed into a parasitic, underachieving welfare state that violated the intent of our founding fathers.
We're the bloated society, the author maintains. Been that way for nearly half a century. The good news is that with the clout of left-leaning Quebec diminishing as the power shifts westward, and with the baby-boom era passing on, we will probably be freed from government's shackles. Unemployment will no longer be a problem. The welfare state will accordingly shrink. We will return to our pre-1960 market glories.
Crowley, president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, is a direct descendant of the survival-of-the-fittest school. Send everybody out onto the free-market tundra, let them beat the daylights out of one another, weed out the strong from the weak – and watch that GDP soar!
But while his book faithfully trots out all the familiar economic and family-values arguments of the right, Crowley is not just another Ayn Rand in trousers. In Fearful Symmetry, he has developed a credible and somewhat original take on Canada's latter-day evolution that is cogent and, in good part, persuasive. Just as you're preparing to drive a fleet of trucks through any one of his many eye-popping postulates, he comes at you with a flurry of convincing statistics and well-documented overtures that have you pressing, as good books should, your rethink button.
Crowley's portrait of Quebec, undergirded with a plethora of studies and stats, is excoriating
He divides his story into welfare-state takers and private-sector makers. The big-time takers were indolent Quebeckers who demanded and soaked up government largesse like sponges and who, the author boldly asserts, would have been far better off without the Quiet Revolution.
“Far from being a model that has secured the economic success of Quebec, Quebec Inc. has created the conditions in which people and capital have fled the province, in which population renewal through both births and immigration has faltered ... in which powerful and essentially parasitic interest groups organize to capture large benefits from the bloated Quebec state while spreading the costs over not just the entire society of Quebec but the entire country of Canada.”
Crowley's portrait of Quebec, undergirded with a plethora of studies and stats, is excoriating. Quebec is a province where the work ethic has been destroyed, where pseudo-work and massive welfare programs predominate, where productivity is lame, where out-migration has crippled economic growth, where common-law unions, lone-parent families, divorce rates and suicide rates are uncommonly high, as is the stress level of its citizenry.
