Parkinson’s Law – Why the State Bureaucracy Grows When the Work Shrinks In 1955, a British naval historian wrote a joke for The Economist. Seventy years later, it remains one of the most accurate descriptions of the modern state ever written. Everyone knows the slogan: work expands to fill the time available. Almost no one knows the mechanism underneath it. That mechanism explains Europe. 1. The evidence. Between 1914 and 1928, the Royal Navy lost two thirds of its largest warships. Over the same years the Admiralty – the office that ran the ships – grew by three quarters. There were fewer ships and more men behind desks. Then there was the Colonial Office, which kept growing while the colonies left one by one. It was hiring while the empire was shrinking. 2. The first mechanism. An official who feels overworked has three choices. He can resign, he can share the work with a colleague, or he can ask for two subordinates. He never chooses the colleague, because a colleague is a rival. Two subordinates are a rank. So one tired man becomes three. Then each of the two subordinates feels tired. 3. The second mechanism. Seven people now do what one did, and they keep each other busy with drafts, approvals, and comments on the approvals. Everyone works hard, and nothing is produced. You have been in this meeting. You have been copied on this email. You have watched three people sign the form that one person filled in. 4. The law of triviality. Parkinson noticed that a committee will approve a nuclear reactor in minutes, because nobody understands it. The same committee will debate the bicycle shed for an hour, because everybody does. Bureaucracy does not avoid the important question by accident. It avoids it by design – the small question carries no risk, and on the big one, someone’s name goes on the decision. 5. The ratchet. A business that fails closes. A department that fails gets a bigger budget, because the problem is now bigger. Failure is the bureaucracy’s best argument for itself. This is why the state never shrinks on its own: every problem it does not solve becomes a new office for solving it. 6. The civilizational lesson. Burnham described the managers taking over. Parkinson showed how they breed. Put the two together and you get Brussels. You get France, where the state spends more than half of everything the country produces and still cannot fix a hospital. This is not because the people inside are wicked. It is because the machine works exactly as Parkinson said it would. 7. The vindication. Parkinson was dismissed as a humorist. Then Milei cut Argentina’s ministries in half – and the country did not collapse. It barely noticed, except on the bill. The lesson is simple: you cannot reform a bureaucracy by asking it what to cut. It will always propose to cut the ships – and hire someone to manage the cut.

You’re right, but there’s more going on. To extend your metaphor, imagine that for the security of my household, I need to ensure we can produce our own food. If we keep buying it at the supermarket, we depend on an external party for something critical to our survival. Take a look at Development Economics. It used to be only for poor economies but the failures of globalization made us realize the U.S. must practice it, too. Secondly, there is a cultural component. The arrogance that Canadians, at least those in public life, have shown toward the U.S. for the past decades is palpable to anyone that has lived or spent significant time there. It’s not their fault, it’s human nature to resent one’s benefactor. It’s healthier for everyone to reset expectations.

Resolve & apprehension: 76% say Canada was right to ditch trade talks, but two-in-five have fear for their jobs angusreid.org/resolve-appreh…

Canada in Denial Canada’s economic debate is trapped between nostalgia and denial. Policy makers and pundits speak as if Canada has unlimited strategic options while refusing to confront the basic facts of the economy. Canada’s comparative advantage is natural resources: energy, critical minerals, agriculture, forestry and water. That is not an embarrassment to regulate into irrelevance. It is the foundation of a more productive national economy. Canada’s central economic relationship is with the US. Canada needs dependable access to the American market; the US needs secure, nearby access to strategic inputs. The bargain should be straightforward: preferential Canadian access to US consumers and industry in return for preferential American access, including competitive pricing, to Canadian energy, critical minerals, and industrial materials. There is precedent. The original Canada-US free trade agreement included the proportionality clause, which effectively assured the US ongoing access to a share of Canadian energy supplies. Canada should revive that underlying logic, this time deliberately and reciprocally. Washington receives dependable strategic resources. Canada receives market access and deeper continental security co-operation, including through the proposed Golden Dome missile-defence architecture. That is not submission. It is leverage. Canada should also stop pretending it can recreate America’s manufacturing base. Canada does have excellent firms and specialised clusters, but not America’s scale, capital markets, domestic demand, supply-chain depth or defence-industrial ecosystem. Subsidising a broad manufacturing mirage will not change those fundamentals. The 1st best strategy should build on what we possess: resource processing, energy infrastructure, critical-mineral refining, agricultural technology and advanced industrial production. Canada must become easier to build in, invest in and finance, with faster approvals, competitive taxes and policy aimed at productive investment rather than property inflation and consumption. President Trump did not create Canada’s predicament. He did not produce weak productivity, depleted private investment or our failure to build. But Washington has made an overdue assessment: the US cannot indefinitely absorb the world’s excess output and debt while its own living standards stagnate and industrial base hollows out. The Trump administration is confronting distortions that earlier governments deferred. Yes, a Hamilton Clay era of economic policy is the foundation. The attacks on the US ambassador to Canada are embarrassing. They are emblematic of a political and media class more interested in attacking the messenger than confronting Canada’s weak competitiveness and dependence on US market access. The global debt cycle is the forcing function. The era of cheap credit, expanding transfers and asset inflation is ending. Canada needs real growth: more investment, energy, output and productivity. To be clear, economic growth dependent on the public sector crowding out the private sector is NOT the solution! It could lead in AI, especially in mining, energy, and Data Centers, but it lacks the vision to connect technology to its economic strengths. Equalization payments, meanwhile, weaken incentives for provinces to reform, hampering structural adjustments. Canada constrains Alberta’s energy industry through federal industrial and regulatory policy, then uses equalisation to transfer revenues generated by Alberta’s resource economy to provinces that have chosen weaker, less productive policy models. Ottawa impedes the country’s most important source of comparative advantage, then asks it to subsidise the inefficiencies elsewhere. In what rational economic system is that logical? The contradiction is almost comical! Canada’s cautionary tale is Argentina, which is only now trying to escape the long decline created by debt, intervention and economic denial.