This Commentary, based on remarks delivered to the Centre for Canada Study Seminar at McGill University, examines economic development and equity programmes in Canada.
In How Bad Politics and Good Intentions Destroyed the Atlantic Canadian Economy, AIMS Founding President Brian Lee Crowley shows how such public policies lead to a welfare state and actually harm the very regions such policy is meant to help. He says programmes need to have stated goals and need to be examined to ensure those goals are met. Crowley says such is not the case in Canada today.
When we cannot ask whether programmes are actually achieving their stated goals because such questions are not asked by true Canadians, who accept them as an article of faith, you begin to understand what Samuel Johnson meant when he said “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” and what Socrates meant when he said that “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
To read the complete Commentary, click here.
