Professor Jack M. Mintz(1) and Globalization: another sanctimonious leader joins the ranks of Jean Chrétien and Roy Romanow
Nipawin - April 5, 2001 - by: Mario deSantis
Canadian Club	Professor Jack Mintz has a problem in understanding the social relationships between
	economics and sovereignty and in his recent speech to a meeting of the Canadian Club(2)
	has stated that
global economy	"Canada's strength as a nation, the prosperity of all its people
	and the influence it has in the world, lies in the wholehearted
	embrace of the global economy."
isolationist	The problem with Professor Mintz is that he uses the wording "global economy"
	inappropriately, for the specific purpose to mislead his audience, and in fact, in his speech,
	he plays with the dichotomy of being global versus being isolationist.
legal framework	But Globalization is not a matter of either being global or isolationist. Globalization, for
	our contingent economic concerns, rests with the international legal framework which
	includes the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Institute Monetary Fund (IMF), and
	the World Bank.
more	I am really not impressed by this sanctimonious professor, and I fear for the brainwashing
	damage this man is creating to our university students and to our policy makers(3). I realize
	that our world is the reflection of our individual and collective mental models we have in our
	heads, but we must distinguish between intelligent mental models and more intelligent mental
	models.
mismanagement	I am concerned, Professor Mintz' brain has remained frozen for sometime, maybe ten or
	eleven years, and this finding transpires when he says that the poor performance of the 90s
	was due to the political mismanagement of our economic policies in the 70s and 80s. Mintz
	says
ruin or retrenchment	"what occurred [in the 70s and 80s] was that fiscal
	mismanagement [was] so broad and continuous that it left us
	with high unemployment, low productivity, high taxes, a
	depreciated currency and a staggering debt load. By the early
	1990s Canadian governments regardless of ideological proclivity
	faced precisely two policy options: ruin or retrenchment."
not directly related	I agree with Canada's mismanagement of the 70s and 80s and I don't agree that in the 90s
	Canada was faced with two policy options "ruin or retrenchment(4)." Economic growth is
	not directly related to the degree of taxation of a country, and economic growth is not
	dependent on the national debt(5).
Paul Romer	Fundamentally, current economic growth (distinct
	from social growth) is directly related to our
	entrepreneurial abilities to what economist Paul
	Romer (right) calls the Economics of Ideas(6).
	Canada performed worse than most other developed
	countries in the 90s, and this was mostly due to the
	continuation of the corrupt behaviour of our political
	and economic leadership. The dichotomy that
	Canada was faced with either "ruin or
	retrenchment" is a concocted propaganda of our
	elitist leadership, who void of ideas but full of
	greedy consensus, downsized Canada into the
	economics for the few and privileged(7).
greedy leadership	What bothers me most is that this same professor
	Mintz was part of the greedy leadership which downsized Canada, and now he is telling us how to
	protect Canada's sovereignty by joining the Globalization directed by the WTO, the IMF, and the
	World Bank.
downsized	What happened to Canada is reflected to what
	happened to its health care system; Canada and its
	health care were both downsized by our sanctimonious
	leadership. This same leadership continues to solve
	our problems today, as Jean Chrétien heads our
	government and as his constitutional friend Roy
	Romanow heads yet another expensive study in
	health care.
same level	This state of affairs reminds me of how valuable is
	the understanding of Romer's Economics of Ideas,
	and how perspective Albert Einstein was when he said that "Problems cannot be solved at the same
	level of understanding that created them." Again, and again, and again, business must not be as
	usual.
------------References/endnotes:
	List of relevant political and economics articles http://ensign.ftlcomm.com
1. -	Jack M. Mintz is Professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. He is also President and CEO of the C.D. Howe Institute
2. - - -	SMART SOVEREIGNTY: CANADIAN PROSPERITY IN AN INTEGRATING WORLD ECONOMY, by Jack M. Mintz, President and CEO C. D. Howe Institute & Arthur Andersen, Professor of Taxation J. L. Rotman School of Management University of Toronto. Prepared for the Canadian Club, April 2, 2001, Royal York Hotel http://www.cdhowe.org/pdf/mintz-6.pdf
3.	The assembly line economics is obsolete, by Mario deSantis, December 26, 2000
4. -	THE EQUITY/EFFICIENCY TRADE-OFF IN RETROSPECT, by Lars Osberg, Revised April 26, 1995 http://is.dal.ca/~osberg/publications.html
5. -	Business must not be as usual, and the "Dalhousie School" of Economics, by Mario deSantis, February 26, 2001
6. -	Economics of Ideas, Author Kevin Kelly on Paul Romer, http://hotwired.lycos.com/wired_online/4.06/romer/
7. - -	Why We Don't Have to Choose between Social Justice and Economic Growth: The myth of the equity/efficiency trade-off, Andrew Jackson, Director of Research, Canadian Council on Social Development, Fall 2000 http://www.ccsd.ca/pubs/2000/equity/index.htm