Ok just forget how crazy the question sounds. The recent wrangling between Ontario and Alberta over the value of the Canadian dollar, oil output and the decline of manufacturing in Ontario (and other provinces east of Ontario) raises some reasonable questions about the Canadian monetary and fiscal union, aka the Confederation of Canada, aka, British North America, aka Canada.
Critics have long argued that the Bank of Canada’s single minded attention to price stability, i.e., inflation, and to a single policy instrument, i.e., the interest rate, was both too crude and too cruel. Too cruel because it makes unemployment the site of dynamic economic dynamic adjustment and too crude because it is both geographically insensitive and structurally daft.
Here I will put the cruel to one side and consider the crude. Interest rate adjustment is a crude way to attempt to manage the macro-economy. Think about the regional dimensions. If you exclude Western Canadian growth the beavers teeth look not nearly so sharp, or as long. The present interest rate regime is probably too low for western Canada and too high for eastern Canada. Suggesting that, all things being equal, the Canadian dollar is probably too high and too low. Too low for the resource sector and too high for manufacturing.
Federal tax policy has not helped either. The unilateral decrease in corporate income tax rates deprived the federal government of resource revenue while having little if any impact on investment in the manufacturing sector. The west did not need a GST rebate the east did. And to add insult to injury, the Federal government has decided to move to an austerian footing. Again viewed through the lens of the west probably not a totally idiotic position to take (countercyclical one might say). Viewed from the east, however, a completely counter-productive, pro-cyclical policy.
All of which raises the question if Ontario, or indeed if all of the provinces east of Manitoba, would not be better off with their own federal government and their own central bank.
O.k. time to remember how crazy the question was. Not that crazy after all. But it is only a sane question because macroeconomic policy (fiscal and monetary policy) is so cruel and crude.
Relentlessly Progressive Political Economy 