Canada is a country so blessed that we’ve been able to be lazy. Geography protects us. Our pension system is sound. Our deficits are modest. Our climate is more secure than most, and we sit on resources essential to the clean-energy transition. Our schools keep producing world-class talent in the industries of the future. Canada is admired not only for its safety but for its freedoms, the kind of open society that attracts people who can live and work anywhere.
By every measure, we are playing with one of the strongest hands in the world, thanks, to a large extent, to a host of sound policy choices that have paid off in the long term. And yet we’ve drifted. Productivity has tipped sideways for decades.
Our best graduates often leave for the United States because we fail to create great opportunities at home. The Bank of Canada finds that this brain drain may account for as much as two-thirds of our productivity gap with the U.S. Housing has become a rationed good, and major infrastructure projects drag on for decades at costs far higher than our peers. Across nearly every system—from health care to energy to public services—the problems we face are unnecessary and self-inflicted.
All is not lost. By making the right choices, the 2030s can be the opposite of the lost decades of the 2010s and 2020s. They could be Canada’s catch-up decade—but only if we have the courage to acknowledge what has gone wrong and then make real changes.
