Randall Bartlett of the Canadian Association for Business Economics hosts Sean Speer, editor at large for The Hub, in this conversation on economic policymaking in practice.
Focusing on Speer’s experience as a senior economic advisor in the prime minister’s office of Stephen Harper, they discuss the circuitous route that brought him there, the lessons learned from the global financial crisis, the differences in experience between producing a budget for a minority government and producing one for a majority government, and a staffers’ eye-view of what working to drive policy forward in government is actually like.
Also in discussion are the ways that conservative thinking, both within Canada’s conservative party and just generally throughout the western world, has begun to change around some fundamental principles of decades past. Speer outlines how new heterodox thinking is being embraced in some conservative circles, especially younger millennial ones, with the emergence of priorities that include a more accepting posture towards industrial policy, reorienting our relationship with China, concerns around domestic productive capacities, and a better accounting for the costs of neoliberal policies and deindustrialization on certain hard-hit regions.
“I think at the moment we are going through a pretty interesting period of introspection and evolution when it comes to economic policy thinking on the right. It’s a bit of a messy process because there are still many who came of age during the defining period of Reagan and Thatcher and to a lesser extent Mulroney who are going through I think an excruciating process of trying to reconcile those ideas with modern realities.”
