Neoliberalism was first born about eight decades ago, a time, not unlike our own, of profound uncertainty and anxiety, when the world was very much in need of new ideas.
It’s the belief in full-throated free market capitalism and the view that “freedom” is society’s highest value and government’s primary role is to ensure “the market’s” flourishing. Amid the post-depression, postwar turmoil, neoliberalism was to be the answer in the postcolonial world to both the failures of laissez-faire capitalism that had delivered the Great Depression and the supposed dangers of the various versions of socialism and social democracy that seemed to be gaining currency. Since then, it has become embedded in the fabric of Canadian government and society and in our background assumptions about how the world works.
