How Canada became the world’s economic Rorschach test
What are friends for if you can’t count on them in your time of need? So take heart, you slumping, sputtering, sluggish world—Canada has your back.
At least that’s the prevailing narrative everywhere you turn right now. From digital news site Quartz, which declared Justin Trudeau to be “the best hope for the global economy,” to the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times with their slightly more restrained analysis, the media has credited the Trudeau government for leading an economically challenged world away from austerity and into the sunny ways of fiscal stimulus.
If that sounds like a message crafted by the government’s own PR squad, it more or less is. Since Finance Minister Bill Morneau released the Liberals’ first post-election budget last month—which repeatedly stated his government was answering the stimulus call of the IMF, the OECD and the G20—the minister and his boss have keenly cast themselves in the role of deficit-spending crusaders.
That the theme has been taken up with such gusto internationally, though, marks only the latest star turn for Canada’s economy in the eyes of the world. Whether Canada was being fêted for escaping the worst of the financial crisis, or for its fiscal prudence during the European debt crisis and the squabbles over America’s debt ceiling that followed, the idea Canada has the fix for what ails the world has proven enduringly enticing—even if the analysis behind those belief is built on a dubious reading of history.
Canada, it seems, is the world’s economic Rorschach test.
The world is looking to Canada as a stimulus model. Really?
What are friends for if you can’t count on them in your time of need? So take heart, you slumping, sputtering, sluggish world—Canada has your back.
At least that’s the prevailing narrative everywhere you turn right now. From digital news site Quartz, which declared Justin Trudeau to be “the best hope for the global economy,” to the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times with their slightly more restrained analysis, the media has credited the Trudeau government for leading an economically challenged world away from austerity and into the sunny ways of fiscal stimulus.
If that sounds like a message crafted by the government’s own PR squad, it more or less is. Since Finance Minister Bill Morneau released the Liberals’ first post-election budget last month—which repeatedly stated his government was answering the stimulus call of the IMF, the OECD and the G20—the minister and his boss have keenly cast themselves in the role of deficit-spending crusaders.
That the theme has been taken up with such gusto internationally, though, marks only the latest star turn for Canada’s economy in the eyes of the world. Whether Canada was being fêted for escaping the worst of the financial crisis, or for its fiscal prudence during the European debt crisis and the squabbles over America’s debt ceiling that followed, the idea Canada has the fix for what ails the world has proven enduringly enticing—even if the analysis behind those belief is built on a dubious reading of history.
Canada, it seems, is the world’s economic Rorschach test.
The world is looking to Canada as a stimulus model. Really?
