Canada's economic folly.

• Author: Steyn, Mark
• Position: Worldview

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UNLIKE AMERICA, Canada is a resource economy: the U.S. imports resources, whereas Canada exports them. It has the second largest oil reserves in the world. People do not think of Canada like that. Traditionally, in the U.S., when the price of oil goes up, Wall Street goes down. Up north, though, when the price of oil goes up, the Toronto stock exchange goes up, too. So, we are relatively compatible neighbors whose interests happen to diverge on one of the key global indicators.

As we know from 9/11, the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia use their oil wealth to spread their destructive ideology to every corner of the world--and so do the Canadians. Consider that, in the last 40 years, fundamental American ideas have made no headway whatsoever in Canada, whereas fundamental Canadian ideas have made huge advances in the U.S. and the rest of the Western world. To take two big examples, multiculturalism and socialized health care, both pioneered in Canada, have made tremendous strides down in the U.S., whereas American concepts, such as nonconfiscatory taxation, remain as foreign as ever north of the border.

My colleague at the National Review, John O'Sullivan, once observed that post-World War II Canadian history is summed up by the old Monty Python song, "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm OK." If you recall that tune. it begins as a robust paean to the manly virtues of a ragged life in the north woods, but it ends with the lumberjack having gradually morphed into a kind of transvestite pickup who likes to wear high heels and dress in women's clothing while hanging around in bars. Of course, O'Sullivan is not saying that Canadian men literally are cross-dressers--certainly no more than 35-40% of us--but rather that a once-manly nation has undergone a remarkable psychological makeover.

If you go back to 1945, the Royal Canadian Navy had the world's third-largest surface fleet; the Royal Canadian Air Force was one of the world's most effective; and Canadian troops got the toughest beach on D-Day. Yet, in the space of two generations, a bunch of tough hombres were transformed into a thoroughly feminized culture that prioritizes all the secondary impulses of society--welfare entitlements from cradle to grave --over all the primary ones. In that, Canada obviously is not alone. If the O'Sullivan thesis is flawed, it only is because the lumberjack song could stand as the postwar history of almost the entire developed world.

Today, the political platforms of at least one party in the U.S. and pretty much every patty in the rest of the Western world are nearly exclusively about those secondary impulses--government health care, government day care, government this, government that. Remember, though, that if you have government health care, you not only annex a huge chunk of the economy, you destroy a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the stale into something closer to that of the junkie and the pusher, and you make it very difficult ever to change back. In Canadian and Continental cabinets, the defense ministry now is a place where an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like running the health department--and, if you listen to Democrats in the U.S., it is dear that American altitudes toward economic liberty are being Canadianized.

To some extent, these differences between the two countries were present at their creations. America's Founders wrote of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The equivalent phrase at Canada's founding was "peace, order, and good government"--the latter words not only are drier, desiccated, and stir the blood less, they presume a degree of statist torpor. Pres. Ronald Reagan famously said, "We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around." In Canada, it too often seems the other way around.

Now that the U.S. seems headed toward a national health cam system--the House of Representatives repeal of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid's handiwork notwithstanding--the differences between our two economies become relatively...