Governments should forget about productivity for a while

A Business Council of Canada report, “Stifled by red tape,” suggests people are dealing with more obligations from above than they used to. Let’s reverse that and see what happens to productivity. Photo by Stockbyte/Getty Images/Postmedia files

I’m beginning to think the country’s productivity crisis could benefit from a period of “benign neglect,” at least at the macro level. “Benign neglect” is the policy Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a White House adviser, recommended for U.S. race relations in a memo to president Richard Nixon in January 1970. “The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over to (sic) hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides.”

I don’t think Canada’s productivity discussion has been taken over by “boodlers” — which Google t