This paper will look at the current financial crisis being experienced in Greece and which now threatens to engulf much of the EU through a comparative lens. The comparator case is the financial crisis experienced by Saskatchewan, Canada in 1992 . Greece and Saskatchewan poses similar weight and scale relative to the EU and Canada respectively. In both Greece and Saskatchewan the crises had similar roots in misbehavior by a previous right-of-centre government. The crises followed a similar developmental path when a subsequent left-of-centre government discovered the problem and ultimately appealed for help to central authorities engaged in advancing a neoliberal agenda. Finally in both Canada and the EU, intergovernmental relations are generally conducted as series of realist based negotiations among parties who see each other as equals, rather than with the subunits subordinated either to the centre or one to another. However, unlike events in the EU today, Canada managed to contain the Saskatchewan crisis and do what was necessary to support Saskatchewan’s government as it dealt with its difficulties. The hypothesis of the paper is that this divergent outcome can be explained by the fact that the EU lacks a societal consensus on the depth and width of what Keith Banting calls “the caring community”. This is the extent to which citizens feel they owe each other a responsibility to look after one another either directly or through state action. Without agreement on this issue, it is impossible for the EU and its member states to respond to the crisis in the way Canada responded to the problem presented by Saskatchewan. Whereas Canada was able to set aside intergovernmental politics as usual to deal with the problem, intergovernmental relations in the EU are proceeding along their usual course and actors are exhibiting their usual forms of behavior. Rather than seeing the economic crisis as a problem that requires pragmatic and rapid solution, it is being treated as a source of leverage for those actors who wish to further embed neoliberalism in the institutions of European government.
