Canada has become the prime bolthole for traumatised Celtic tiger cubs piling out of this banjaxed republic in planeload after planeload. The twinkling skyscrapers of downtown Toronto are the new Ellis Island for yet another generation of Irish emigrants, while Vancouver has become a snow-capped sanctuary where no one mentions the 'R' word.

Brian Lenihan – whose father infamously declared as tánaiste that "we can't all live on this small island" (as if people were falling off the cliffs of Moher due to overcrowding) – must get some comfort from this knowledge as he sharpens his axe for yet another round of eye-watering budget cuts which will swell the departure lounges still further.

Lenihan also, doubtless, draws solace from the knowledge that the eyes of Canada's internationally celebrated finance minister are smiling upon his austerity measures. And, sure, aren't they Irish eyes as well?

Canada's Jim Flaherty is very proud of his Hibernian ancestry, gleefully accepting a gift of hurley sticks for his triplet sons when he addressed a luncheon hosted by the Ireland Canada Business Association in Dublin this autumn. He heaped considerable praise upon his Irish counterpart during his stay here.

"Canada's finmin defends Irish policy despite downgrade" reported Reuters to the world. In fact, Flaherty hailed this little state as Europe's leader in fiscal reform, telling RTé radio: "Ireland certainly has led the European Union in taking the necessary decisions towards fiscal consolidation."

Visit Canada, however, and you soon discover that Flaherty is flattering our finance minister. Deep down, he knows that draconian budgets cuts are the last thing any country, far less the world economy, needs as it teeters perilously on the brink of a double-dip recession or even another Great Depression.

Although a fiscal conservative to his fingertips, Flaherty can no longer walk the talk. He is so spooked by a downward spiral he has ceased to practise in Ottawa the creed he has preached throughout his political career – although he still preaches it in Dublin.

Flaherty's chief strategy for keeping Canada sheltered from the global financial storm has been to adopt a strikingly Keynesian approach. Even though he knew he would be demonised by dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, he swiftly decided "to stimulate the economy with government money, with taxpayers' money, to replace the absence of private demand".

With James Michael Flaherty's signature on the authorisation forms, Ottawa is making the single biggest federal investment in public infrastructure since the second world war. With its partners in the provinces and the private sector, its 'Building Canada' plan will plough €70bn over the next seven years into roads, bridges, water systems, public transit and international gateways.

Of course, the Canadians are far better placed to splash out in this way because they are in the uniquely envious situation of having escaped the global crash which has engulfed their reckless southern neighbour as much as Ireland. Canada's powerful and prudent Big Five banks were properly regulated, particularly in mortgage lending, and a succession of governments started to get to grips with runaway government spending a full decade and a half ago.

By the mid-1990s, Canada's national debt had swelled to almost 80% of GDP. There were threats of the IMF being called in as the Wall Street Journal snidely noted that the world's second-largest state (in area) had become "an honorary member of the Third World in the unmanageability of its debt problem".

By 2007, after over a decade of fiscal responsibility, Canada's debt burden had been slashed to just 15% of GDP. With Ottawa recording annual budget surpluses at the beginning of the millennium, one supportive think tanker proclaimed the 2000s the "redemptive decade". But it wasn't Jim Flaherty who performed this economic miracle. The Conservative Party of Canada, newly reconstituted under the leadership of Stephen Harper, only came back to power in 2006. Au contraire, Flaherty was finance minister of Ontario during the retrenchment. He complained loudly about the painful effects of health and education cutbacks in the Canada's most populous province. He'd have done it differently, he reflected recently.

It was the natural party of government in Canada for most of the 20th century, the Liberal Party, which wielded the axe. Paul Martin dragged his country back from the brink of bankruptcy in 1995 when, as the then finance minister, he implemented what he called "the largest set of actions in any Canadian budget since demobilisation after the second world war".

On a recent visit to Ottawa, I met up with Ralph Goodale, who was Canada's finance minister from 2003 to 2006, in his parliamentary office suite. Now deputy leader of the Liberals, he told me: "In response to all the accolades Canada is now attracting around the world, we say, 'Thanks, that's the Liberal legacy.'"

What he didn't add – and Jim Flaherty also conveniently forgets – is that Canada's "redemptive decade" coincided with a credit-fuelled boom in the US. With the US accounting for almost 80% of Canada's trade, American prosperity contributed enormously to an expansion of the Canadian private sector. Without that, Canada's savage cutbacks could have been as catastrophic as Ireland's are currently proving to be.

There is a time and a place for fiscal consolidation. Canada from 1995 to 2007 was one such place. Ireland in 2010 is anything but. In slamming through a series of slash-and-burn budgets, Brian Lenihan has acutely compounded the bleakest financial crisis since the foundation of the Free State.

Things can only get even grimmer for this country when Britain, still our biggest trading partner, starts to feel the full effects of George Osborne's austerity measures. And Canada cannot continue indefinitely to supply a refuge from the storm. Irish job-seekers in Toronto and Vancouver are already encountering rejection and deportation orders as the effects of the American economic meltdown begin to seep across the 49th Parallel.

Canada's finance minister would give a wry smile if he heard the former Bank of Ireland chief, Mike Soden, advocating that Ireland should apply to become the 51st state of the USA. And, for all his flattery when visiting the auld sod, Jim Flaherty assuredly won't be inviting this banjaxed republic to become Canada's 11th province.

Rob Brown is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Independent College Dublin