Economic outlook better than it seems
During the end of 2015 and the first weeks of 2016, Canadians had to come to terms with the gloomiest news served to them for a long, long time about the state of our economy.
This was justified. The evershrinking value of our dollar is close to setting a new, all-time record. The global commodity boom, from which we once profited so greatly, has gone bust. The heady talk about ourselves as “an energy superpower” is now an embarrassment.
All of this is familiar. Less wellknown but as important: our record in productivity gains that is, essentially, the state of our economic efficiency - and in innovation or the development of new products by new, exportoriented corporations, lags behind many of our competitors.
To put it bluntly, we are in many ways still the same nation of hewers of wood and drawers of water we were when we started out 150 years ago in the Confederation of 1867 that we’ll soon celebrate.
More troubling, other hewers and drawers do it better than we do. Australia is, like us, a onetime British colony blessed with a lot of resources. But it’s outpacing us.
Our unemployment rate is 7.1 per cent; theirs is 5.8 per cent. Our gross domestic product grew by a measly 1.1 per cent last year; theirs by a creditable 2.3 per cent.
So our outlook indeed is bleak. Actually, not so. We still occupy, as has been the case throughout our history, the best real estate in the world: We are next door to the huge, rich U.S. market and know it better by far than does anyone else. The cheapness of the loonie ought to win us exports there, if only more of our businessmen were entrepreneurs.
In several critical respects, we’ve actually overtaken the U.S.
The “American Dream,” or the fond belief that anyone there can rise from the bottom to affluence, has moved northward. Proportionately, many more Canadians than Americans now climb the ladder and do it by themselves rather than by relying on their parents’ pocketbooks.
Our education system is superior. U.S. universities have far more money and many more Nobel laureates.
But just less than 60 per cent of young Canadians (the 25 to 34 year-olds) achieve tertiary education as against just more than 40 per cent of Americans.
In the wide world, only South Korea and Japan outdo us.
Our political system is incomparably duller. But Canada’s is incomparably more democratic. There, money is decisive.
Here, it is a minor advantage. And while Rob Ford did win the Toronto mayoralty, Donald Trump could win the presidency and do vastly greater damage.
Hard times, certainly difficult times, do indeed lie ahead of us. Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz said it best by commenting that “no simple policy response” exists and that the required “adjustment” of Canada’s economy could be “difficult and painful” and might take as many as five years to accomplish.
An article in Sunday’s New York Times also said it well. The old Canada, “the land of hyper-politeness and constant apology,” had “quietly morphed into a multicultural breeding ground.”
From this integration of all kinds of people from all over the world had come, according to the Times, a raft of new Canadians such as rappers and fashion designers and comedians and entertainers and the founders of hot magazines and, to name a name, Oscar nominee Rachel McAdams.
As for the contemporary characters of the two North American nations, the one that most struck the Times was that, while many American politicians had called that no Muslims at all be allowed in, at the same time the prime minister had gone to greet those who had reached here and then had helped them on with their new, warm, coats.
We’ll survive.