How Canadians are Different from Americans, but similar to Germans

I don't always keep track of goings-on in the Old Country but this article tells us, if nothing else, that the Canadian Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, is rather confused. Flaherty says he doesn't like QE (quantitative easing), which would be OK, as long as he could come up with some semi-coherent reasons. But, Flaherty says:

The Americans tend to emphasize creating more jobs and less concern about the accumulation of public debt and printing more money, with which I’ve never agreed. The Germans tend to be more prudent and frugal like Canadians tend to be.

First, Flaherty doesn't seem to understand that managing the size of the public debt is actually his job, and not the job of the central bank. Central banks may indeed be venturing into the traditional territory of the fiscal authority by engaging in QE, as QE looks more like debt management (altering the maturity structure of the outstanding government debt) than traditional monetary intervention. But QE cannot change the total quantity of consolidated government debt outstanding, only the composition of the debt, except perhaps indirectly. Further, in present circumstances in the U.S., QE is not "printing money." QE consists (in the QE3 operation currently underway) of swaps of interest-bearing reserves for long-maturity government debt and mortgage-backed securities. The reserves in question currently look more like short-maturity government debt than they look like anything we might want to call "money."

The really funny part of the quote above involves Flaherty's unflattering view of profligate Americans. Apparently he hasn't been talking to the Americans who think of their government as ridiculously austere. Somehow Flaherty thinks that Canadians are more like Germans. I just don't see it. This reminds me of a joke, which goes something like this: Canada could have had American technology, British government, and French culture. Instead it got French government, British technology, and American culture.