September 19, 2012 – Our recent AEI/MLI event, Fiscal sanity and political success: Canada proves you can have it all, has received a great deal of media attention and so has our new book, Northern Light: Lessons for America from Canada’s Fiscal Fix.
In The Wall Street Journal, journalist Paul Vieira highlights the keynote speech given at the event by former Prime Minister Paul Martin.
In a column by Kevin Carmichael of The Globe and Mail, he covers the full event and highlights our new book. An excerpt from Carmichael’s column below:
Mr. Crowley knows how to put on a show. The event featured a bravura performance from keynote speaker Paul Martin, the former prime minister who, as finance minister, turned a generation of budget deficits into a decade of budget surpluses. A separate panel discussion included Stockwell Day, the former federal and Alberta cabinet minister, and Janice MacKinnon, the former Saskatchewan finance minister. It was like a Montreal Canadiens alumni team, only for Canadian economic policy geeks.
The message to the Americans in the room from Mr. Crowley: you can do this. His book, which he co-authored with Robert Murphy, shows that the spending cuts Mr. Martin implemented were bigger in magnitude than those proposed by President Barack Obama’s deficit commission, led by former Republican senator Alan Simpson and former Democratic White House adviser Erskine Bowles, and the proposal of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s nominee for vice president. The locals were impressed. Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at AEI who was asked to comment on the Canadian presentations, said Canada’s experience spoke to the need for “politicians that are willing to show leadership and take chances.”
Read the full Globe and Mail column here.
