As Canadians struggle to wrap their isolated economic heads around the $300-billion exploding Canadian COVID-19 fiscal imbalance, along comes a new report from the Public Policy Forum that asks Canadian policy-makers to launch a massive post-pandemic state-run industrial strategy program.
Released this week, “A Challenge-Driven Industrial Strategy for Canada” is the second in the think-tank’s New North Star series spearheaded by former economic advisers Sean Speer (Conservative) and Robert Asselin (Liberal), with help from Royce Mendes (bank economist).
Here’s a one-sentence summation of the “challenge-driven” industrial strategy proposal outlined in the report: The Canadian and global economies have performed magnificently through most of the past four decades of trade liberalization, globalization and market-driven growth, therefore it is now time to abandon those successful policies and adopt a new economic model based on the top-down economic policies imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China.
In others words, Canada should now import from China what is fast becoming one of China’s biggest exports: state economic planning and control. According to the Speer/Asselin/Mendes report, “The Chinese government has been ahead of the United States in particular and Western countries in general in terms of implementing a deliberate industrial strategy in order to develop comparative advantages in the intangibles economy. It has worked.”
China’s rise, they say, is due to the Communist Party’s adoption of a state-driven “alternative to democratic capitalism.” China’s rise is allegedly due to its ability to use state planning to dominate the new global paradigm that’s taking shape around the “intangibles economy.”
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Jack’s Note: First impressions on this idea ( I read it very quickly) leave me with a very bad feeling. Probably because it seems to echo the very worst aspects of Chicom trade practices. Please leave your thoughts if you have any.
