Canadians should be careful what they complain about, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney suggested to the nation's premiers at their meeting of the Council of the Federation in Quebec City last week.
In an optimistic look-ahead that contrasted dramatically to the premiers' own pessimism, Mr. Carney predicted that Canada will fare fairly well economically over the next two years. The economy, he thinks, is in pretty good shape, better shape than most industrialized nations. And when rising oil prices -- the premiers' prime concern -- and the more expensive food that devolves from them are factored out of the equation, inflation looks like it is holding steady at about two per cent until 2010.
It is the rising price of oil and gas that is keeping the economy steady, Mr. Carney says, boosting corporate profits, wages and the standard of living, not just in the oil patch but right across the country.
That is quite a different picture than the premiers paint. They see the economy as a storm-tossed ship on a troubled ocean. Ontario and Quebec want the bank to reduce the value of the dollar to make their manufacturing industries more competitive. All the premiers worry that high energy costs will leave Canadians with little money to spend on other things, leading to a general decline in economic well-being across the nation. They want the central bank to do something about what they themselves can't control.
One hopes that it is Mr. Carney rather than the premiers who is right about this, but the country will have to go a little further down the road yet before we know the answer to that. Rising energy costs are either the silver lining in the economic cloud or the root of all our problems, depending which version of the story you embrace, but because neither the bank nor the premiers can really control them, the premiers should concentrate on things they can handle.
To their credit, they did do a bit of that. Although it does not always seem like it, Canada is one nation. Canadians, however, are not free to work wherever they choose, with skilled workers often barred by government regulations from moving from one province to another to practise their trade, despite the truth that, as Premier Gary Doer said, "a nurse is a nurse, a teacher is a teacher, a welder is a welder."
The premiers agreed to remove these barriers to the free movement of labour by April of next year, a small step forward but an obvious improvement from the status quo. Curiously, unions oppose it, but Canadians should welcome it as a step towards thinking of Canada as one country rather than just a confederation of regions. The nation's leaders need to be concerned about crises such as rising energy costs, but they also need to pay attention to problems that can be more readily resolved. By pulling down this inter-provincial barrier, the premiers have shown that they can occasionally do that.
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