Minding the Public Purse: The Fiscal Crisis, Political Trade-off, and Canada's Future

David Robinson is an associate professor of economics at Laurentian
University.

Janice MacKinnon was Saskatchewan’s finance minister during the
national and provincial deficit crisis, and she was in the cabinet when
the province finally faced its health-care crises. Both events forced
politicians to challenge the public’s expectations of government, and
both have reshaped the Canada political scene. Minding the Public Purse
is a mixture of political memoir and acute analysis. For students of the
Canadian political scene, it is a treasure trove. MacKinnon gives us a
picture of the end of the Canada many of us grew up in and the beginning
of a new Canada shaped by Martin and the fiscal realities of the 21st
century.

MacKinnon is now a professor of public policy at the University of
Saskatchewan. She has a very sharp understanding of the economic and
political situation. As a member of the elite and embattled community of
finance ministers, she worked with the people most deeply involved in
the nation’s fiscal crisis.

Her writing is clear, engaging, and often entertaining, and her candid,
forceful descriptions of issues and players from the inside are a
significant contribution. She offers a dramatic image of herself as
“Combat Barbie” serving in a moderate, courageous “war cabinet.”
She is not positive about the doctrinaire members of her own party’s
“liquor cabinet,” who opposed her. “Leftist” and “activist”
become terms of opprobrium, and her true peers are in the “finance
ministers’ club.” She speaks highly of even her conservative
counterparts in Ontario and Alberta and especially of federal finance
minister Paul Martin.

MacKinnon will continue to be an influential player in the debate over
health-care policy and in other areas. The book lays out her views in
detail. Much of the background is familiar, but it is a pleasant
surprise to discover that MacKinnon’s Saskatchewan is still Canada’s
most innovative province and that her provincial, western, liberal-left
perspective so exactly reflects core Canadian values.