William Watson: Who will be minister for summer camp? 

Camps apparently generate “up to” $3 billion in revenues, which is another bad reason to consider supporting them. Photo by Getty images

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My favourite part of Canada’s Constitution is where the far-sighted Fathers of Confederation gave every child of the new country they had created the right to attend the summer camp of their choice.

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Oh, I’m sorry! It seems there is no such right in the Constitution. Summer camp isn’t mentioned at all, in fact, not even to allocate jurisdiction for it to the federal or provincial governments.

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That’s not the impression you’d get, however, from recent stories on CBC’s The National and even in the New York Times‘ weekly Canada Letter, where declining attendance at summer camp is treated as a national problem of major importance — maybe not important enough to be addressed by the federal Major Projects Office, but one that no less than the minister of finance should look into.

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It seems Canadian kids aren’t going to summer camp in the same numbers they used to. The cited reasons are several: rising staff wages, insurance premiums and food costs, as well as increasing competition from attractive alternative activities, including travel.

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This is a problem for the economy, the New York Times implied, because camps employ 42,000 mainly young people and you know that if those 42,000 jobs disappeared the people currently holding them would never, ever find employment again.

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“Job creation” is the worst reason for supporting an activity. If the demand for camps completely collapses, which it won’t, the demand for camp employment will collapse, too. But if consumers switch away from one kind of spending to another, the total number of jobs in the economy doesn’t fall, though people in the declining industry will have trouble — and ought to have trouble — staying employed there. We give them employment insurance if they’ve been at it long enough. Do they really have a basic human right to keep the job even if consumers no longer want what they’re selling? What happens to the economy if over time more and more people are “employed” in such sinecures?

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Camps also apparently generate “up to” $3 billion in revenues, which is another bad reason to consider supporting them. First because with the country’s GDP running at $2.4 trillion, three billion constitutes just a tad over one tenth of one per cent. I’d happily take a $3-billion gratuity but, in terms of bumping up GDP, camp doesn’t really register.

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And second because “good for GDP” is almost as lousy an argument for supporting an activity as “creates jobs.” We’re all slaves to GDP in today’s world. If an economist so much as mutters under his breath that activity X creates a non-negative amount of GDP, that’s grounds for the country’s ministers of finance to start revving up the subsidies. And of course a professor or two can be trotted out to at least imply that summer camp generates important “externalities.” The New York Times reporter was very impressed by the emphasis in Canadian camps on developing “grit” in kids. Yes, how can we hope to take on Putin if we haven’t gritted up our kids with paddle-boarding and grilling s’mores?

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If an activity’s costs rise and people decide as a result to engage in it less, that’s not cause for a policy response. It’s actually a pretty normal characteristic of a market economy. In fact, it’s one of the great virtues of a market system. People’s preferences change. What they’re willing to spend on a given activity changes. If you get into a business and over time the business begins to go downhill, you do not have a constitutional right — not even a U.N. human rights committee right — to have the business and the income that goes with it preserved.