My Letter to the Financial Post

William Watson is an economist who is right to be chagrined by the presence of only one professional economist on the 16-member Economic Advisory Council ("There’s a lot more to the economy than simply business,"--FP  July 17). He argues that Jack Mintz can't be expected to be the voice of labour and consumers as well as the whole economics profession, and I heartily concur.

 But Watson fails to ask a bigger question: does this government's repeated pattern of policy errors, such as stumbling too quickly into subprime mortgages, income trusts, expansion of foreign workers into services and manufacturing, and deregulation of railways, or moving too slowly on First Nations consultation, environmental regulation,rail safety  and food labelling, all stem from a blinkered,ideological confusion of business interests with good economic policy?   If that is true--or even partially true-- then shouldn't the Economic Advisory Council act as a corrective lens that provides more economic analysis and non-business input into the formative stages of policy-making?

 The government's stubborn refusal to do so amounts to willful blindness, motivated no doubt by an awareness that the nation's top economists are a continuing source of inconvenient truth.

Here is Watson's column, reproduced with permission from the Financial Post:

William Watson: There's a lot more to the economy than simply business

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