By Alex Usher. The economic and fiscal history of Canada from the early 70s to the mid-90s is one long, bad disaster movie (the Cassandra Crossing, say).  Unemployment went over 6% in 1974 and didn’t come back down to that level until 2008.  For nearly all of the 1980s, it was over 8% and from 1982 to 1994 it was over 10% half the time.  The Keynesian medicine that was supposed to get us out of such messes simply did not work because the problems were structural. More...