Alejandro Chafuen, Forbes In their 2010 book The Canadian Century: Moving Out of America’s Shadow, Brian Lee Crowley, Jason Clemens, and Niels Veldhuis, three leading Canadian policy and think tank experts, described the great opportunity lying ahead for our northern …

In their 2010 book The Canadian Century: Moving Out of America’s Shadow, Brian Lee Crowley, Jason Clemens, and Niels Veldhuis, three leading Canadian policy and think tank experts, described the great opportunity lying ahead for our northern neighbor. Public policy reforms that increased market incentives, opened new areas to trade and production, and moved toward increased economic freedom and financial stability, reversed the trends that made Canada lag behind the U.S. Canada today ranks ahead of the United States in economic freedom and in transparency, as well as in many other economic indicators such as lower levels of debt, less unemployment, and higher GDP growth.

During the last decades, most of the efforts to study the importance of free enterprise and to develop private solutions to public policy problems took place at independent think tanks. The economic freedom indices, health savings accounts and the focus on regulatory burdens are good examples. Leadership came from think tanks, not the academy.