Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 30, Part One. A Deficit Hawk Wanted To Cut Deep

   Chapter 30 , Part One. A Deficit Hawk

      There were thousands of young women called Sandra in the English speaking part of 1950's Montreal. Yet somehow Sandra Gelfand or 'Sandy' as she was called, stood out in the crowd. She had dark short hair, a flashing smile and always wore neat clothes and well shod shoes. She was clever and was one of the few young women who could match most of the males in high school classes in algebra, geometry and science.
    "My daughter's going to McGill University," her proud father a small businessman, told his friends in the summer of 1960. McGill stood out as a downtown English speaking bastion in the city of Montreal. In Montreal back then about half the population spoke English as their first language while the other half spoke French. Nearly all the people in the rest of the province of Quebec were French Canadians. Yet McGill and  its deans and teachers could for now  ignore the coming upheaval of 'The Quiet Revolution' that would change many things in Quebec.
     At one time Jewish students like Gelfand and her friends would have had a hard time getting into McGill as students. But those days were in the past. Once she entered university, Gelfand took tough hard science courses and she did well in them. Yet she also in first year took an economics history course and was turned on by economics. "If you want to study economics," the economics teacher  told her, "you have to study mathematics." Since Gelfand was already studying mathematics she didn't need to make many big changes in her cirriculum. She went on to study calculus, advanced calculus and linear algebra. Once again, she was a woman in classes where nearly all the students were male. Yet here too she excelled in the courses she took.
    She also read books by big name economists. Yet she liked the right wing economists best. Milton Friedman's book 'Capitalism and Freedom' became one of her favourite books. While most of her girl friends read romances or thumbed through the pages of 'Cosmopolitan' magazine, Gelfand ploughed through the works of conservative thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Frederick Hayek.
     After graduating from McGill with honours, Sandra won a scholarship to a university in New England. Here, she laboured through graduate school and got an M.A. in economics. Then she had to study even harder to get a Ph.D. in economics. Yet she succeeded here too.
       By now it was the late 1960's and U.S. universities and colleges were embroiled in protest. In the streets of America, African Americans, whose protests had ignited protest by other groups, were demanding social justice. Thousands of students marched against the draft and the Vietnam War. Soon these groups were followed by Spanish speaking Americans, First Nations and women. Yet Gelfand remained unmoved by all this furore. "Politics is not for me,' she told her friends. Also she objected to some of the demands of  many protestors. "They want too many things for free," she said. Her parents had worked hard in their small business to make a living and others, Sandra felt, should do the same.