Minding the Public Purse: The Fiscal Crisis, Political Trade-offs, and Canada's Future (review)

In 1991, Janice MacKinnon, an academic historian with little political experience, was parachuted into a safe NDP seat as part of Roy Romanow's promise to increase female representation in the Saskatchewan legislature. She was immediately named to cabinet as minister of social services, and within two years was promoted to minister of finance.

In this book, she sets out to provide an insider's look at how provincial and federal governments dealt with the debt crisis of the 1990s.

What I found to be the most interesting aspect of the book - a view that she seems to share herself - was the stark contrast between the approaches taken by her government and that of Alberta. Whereas Alberta was driven by the ideological premise that smaller government was better, Saskatchewan clearly took the view that government was both a protector of, and provider for, its citizens.

Whereas the Alberta government went to great lengths to publicize the extent of its debt problems, in order to justify its dramatic restructuring policies, Saskatchewan's politicians were dragged into five years of budget cuts only when threatened with financial disaster.

Whereas Jim Dinning chopped and slashed with the enthusiasm of the Red Queen 'cutting off their heads,' Janice MacKinnon resembled the Walrus, crying as each rural hospital was closed, as each agricultural subsidy was sacrificed.

But where the two provinces differed most significantly was in the theoretical underpinnings of their policies. Whatever one might think of the ideological motivation for the 'Klein revolution,' it is undeniable that his government had a well-conceived battle plan based on the extensive literature on 'reinventing government.' Although Alberta cut budgets, it simultaneously introduced measures to maintain the level of services by encouraging agencies to increase efficiency. Among many other policies, the number of hospital boards was reduced dramatically; some services were privatized; charter schools were encouraged, to create competition; key performance indicators were introduced; some regulatory functions were turned over to industry groups; and the internal budgeting process was revised to restrict the influence of special interest groups.

In contrast, Ms. MacKinnon provides few, if any, examples of a plan any deeper than 'reduce the deficit to zero within four years.' Indeed, she notes herself that 'moving beyond promoting efficiency to experimenting with innovative ways of delivering services represented an ideological fork in the road' (137) - a fork at which Alberta and New Brunswick took one turning, while Saskatchewan took the other. It appears that left-wing governments, such as hers, were not willing to contemplate the possibility that government agencies might be inefficient. And because they were efficient already, there was no point trying to improve them. As a result, as Ms. MacKinnon describes it, Saskatchewan's budgetary changes were restricted primarily to cuts, not to restructuring.

Of course, it is possible that Saskatchewan did have a deeper plan behind its budget-cutting exercises and that Ms. MacKinnon chose not to reveal it. This is a real possibility, as I found that the greatest weakness in this book was that it treated economic issues superficially. At times the reader is given the impression that Ms. MacKinnon saw her role less as the guardian of the Saskatchewan economic system than as a player in a political game - in which the primary purpose was to score points off one's political adversaries.

Ms. MacKinnon's conversion from spendthrift socialist to fiscal conservative appears to have occurred virtually overnight, and with little explanation. For example, instead of providing arguments to convince the reader that the left wing of the NDP was wrong when it contended that 'the fiscal crisis was a phantom conjured up by right-wing governments' (136), or that the government's best policy was to renege on its debt, she merely asserts that proponents of these views were wrong.

The result is that although I found the first two-thirds of this...