John Robson: Canada’s National Debt Is Off the Charts, yet There’s No Talk of Welfare Reform

Commentary A worrying Epoch Times story says the proportion of Americans dependent on government for their income has grown rapidly in the last half-century. But what’s really worrying is that here, as there, the issue has vanished from public discussion, not because it’s unimportant but because it’s hard. Thirty years ago, welfare reform was a hot topic here, as there. In the United States, major changes seemed to work, and Bill Clinton even declared in his January 1996 State of the Union that “the era of big government is over.” But nobody told big government. And in Canada, drastic fiscal measures by Jean Chretien and Paul Martin to avoid “hitting the wall” necessarily involved cutting social spending because, as anyone who seriously examined the books quickly realized, it’s where the money was going....