FAILING GRADE
Canada falling behind when it comes to education, innovation and quality of life,
The cerebral Daniel Patrick Moynihan, among the wisest men ever to serve in the U.S. Senate, once said, “It occurs to me that Canada’s national life has been insufficiently troubled.”
Moynihan’s country has been forged in upheaval: a revolutionary war, a civil war and wild, disruptive swings in the capitalism cycle.
By contrast, Canada came into existence 148 years ago peaceably, and its progress since, relative to other nation-building projects, has been largely untroubled.
Canada accounts for just 0.5 per cent of the world’s population, but 1.5 per cent of global GDP. The Canadian economy, which ranks ninth in the world, has grown at a faster pace over the past decade than its G7 peers, by almost 40 per cent, compared with Germany (29 per cent), the U.S. (26 per cent), France (23 per cent), Britain (14 per cent), Italy (11 per cent) and Japan (6 per cent).
With one of the world’s most open-door immigration policies, Canada is better able to cope with the two demographic spectres of this century — population decline and a growing imbalance between working and retired populations.
Japan and Russia have already gone into population decline, and Western Europe will soon follow, due to an aging population and an increasingly virulent xenophobia dating from the onset of the European financial crisis. But, thanks to immigration, Canada will grow by a forecast 2.5 per cent a year over the next three decades. And the U.S. will add an expected 40 million people, which bodes well for a Canada reliant on the U.S. market for export revenue.
Canada is blessed with one of the world’s most stable financial-markets systems. And in the TSX, it has the leading centre for raising capital for naturalresource development. Forbes magazine now counts Toronto among the world’s top 10 financial centres.
Canada outperforms its G7 peers in public-sector integrity, ranking 10th in Transparency International’s latest report on 175 countries, in which the U.S. ranks 17th. And growth in average wealth of Canadian households has been strong — a 73-per-cent increase, to $554,100 between 1999 and 2012, according to a Statistics Canada report published earlier this month.
That helps explain Canada’s No. 5 ranking in the latest UN World Happiness Report. Canadians feel better about their lives than residents of other G7 countries, including the U.S. (No. 15), Germany (No. 26) and Japan (No. 46).
But we might not feel so chipper after taking a closer look at our report card:
Quality of life: Canada held top place in the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) for several years in the 1990s. Today, in this measure of life expectancy, per-capita income and years of schooling, Canada ranks eighth, trailing, among others, the U.S. (fifth) and Germany (sixth).
Education: In its first (2000) report, the OECD-sponsored Programme for International Student Assessment of 15-year-old students in more than 40 countries ranked Canadian students seventh in math, sixth in science and second in reading. Canada has since taken a tumble, ranking 13th in math, 10th in science and seventh in reading in the latest report, released in 2013.
Ease of Doing Business: Ottawa has forfeited billions of dollars by slashing the corporate tax rate from 21 per cent to 15 per cent. (The U.S. rate is 35 per cent). Yet the World Bank’s annual Ease of Doing Business survey ranks Canada a dismal 16th-best among places to do business, trailing three G7 countries (the U.S., Britain and Germany) as well as the former Soviet republic of Georgia. When Stephen Harper took office as prime minister, Canada placed fourth in this ranking.
Gender gap: According to the HDI, women in Canada on average have almost a year more schooling than men. Yet the gross annual per-capita income of Canadian men is 42 per cent higher. (The U.S. gap is 52 per cent.)
Innovation: In its latest report on science and technology performance, the OECD found that Canada’s R&D spending as a percentage of GDP ranked a miserable 21st. Chronic business underinvestment in R&D — at 0.88 per cent of GDP it is outranked by most OECD countries — helps account for Canada’s chronically low rate of productivity growth.
Canada is the only country in the Western Hemisphere with universal singlepayer health care; it taught the world a new way of telling time (Sir Sandford Fleming’s Standard Time) and it developed insulin, the fibre-optics backbone of the global Internet and the smartphone, and it has been resting on its laurels.
Perhaps Moynihan was right in speaking of a Canadian placidity that can also be seen as complacency. Good fortune didn’t fall into our laps. Our predecessors worked hard to create the conditions for it. We now risk letting it slip away, as others take the lead in striving for continual improvement. dolive@thestar.ca