Insulated from instability, Canada’s blessings exceed its worries

Over the Canada Day weekend, as we consider how fortunate we are to live in the best little country in the world, it's impossible not to cast a glance southward.

Our American friends seem to have lost their way, electing an ignorant, vulgarian president who seems bent on dismantling the ties that hold the West together and moving the world’s most powerful country closer to some of the world’s worst regimes.

The right-wing populism that led to that result and to Britain’s exit from the European Union is present in Canada, of course. But what is it about us that has kept us above the fray, so to speak?

We could point to the fact that Canada weathered the Great Recession of 2008 better than most other Western democracies. Also, unlike Britain and the U.S., we haven’t suffered the horrible terrorism visited upon those countries since 2001. Those two factors alone are bound to make an electorate jittery enough to do something destabilizing.

Also, we haven’t been swamped by refugees and immigrants in the same way some European countries have (notably Italy), or like the U.S. We’ve taken our share, but it’s been a more orderly process and we’ve largely gotten to pick and choose whom we take. Not so on the southern U.S. border or in Germany.

Other factors? Well, for all our griping about our political class, the bureaucrats running our country are mostly competent and honest. We seem to have tamed Quebec separatism for now. Unemployment is at record lows and inflation is under control. Government deficits and spending are not out of hand, at least in comparison to other industrial democracies.

But there’s nothing special about Canada there. Most other western democracies are competently managed, too.

So why do we always end up on top of the charts? For instance, the U.S. News & World Report published the results of a study earlier this year by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School that listed Canada as the second-best country in the world.

Forbes ranks us No. 7 in its 2018 list of the world’s happiest countries. We have the world’s 10th-largest economy despite having only 36 million people.

Let’s not get too smug. Our economy is a bit too dependent on extraction of a resource that’s responsible for climate change.

Our First Nations struggle with a bewildering array of social and economic problems. Too many people feel excluded from our overall prosperity and wellbeing.

And here in the Atlantic provinces, demographic shortcomings portend some serious problems paying for health care and other government services in the not-so-distant future.

Our advantages are well-documented: Being surrounded on three sides by oceans is a guarantee of security, and our one neighbour is also our best friend, even though it’s experiencing a bit of a manic episode presently.

Our sheer geographic size guarantees the presence of every resource we could need. We’re thin on the ground, so we’ve got room to grow. We’re well-educated and our surroundings are staggeringly beautiful.

So we’ve got it good, there’s no doubt. Our blessings exceed our worries by a longshot.

Now if only we could do something about the winter.

(This pre-Canada Day editorial was published June 30 in the Halifax Chronicle Herald and distributed by The Canadian Press.)