How to close the gap between Canada’s performance and potential: Hunter Prize 2025

The Hub’s third annual Hunter Prize for Public Policy, generously supported by the Hunter Family Foundation, focused on solving Canada’s stagnant living standards and slow productivity growth. A diverse group of ten finalists has been chosen from nearly 250 entries, with the finalists and winners chosen by an esteemed panel of judges, including Theo Argitis, Hon. Lisa Raitt, Frances Donald, Jack Mintz, and Alicia Planincic. The Hub is pleased to run essays from each finalist this week that lay out their plans to help solve this persistent policy problem. The Hunter Prize is made possible thanks to the support of the Centre for Civic Engagement. “I’m saying that it’s an emergency—it’s time to break the glass.” That was the stark warning last year from Carolyn Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, about Canada’s worsening productivity crisis. Canada’s prosperity once rested on a simple expectation: each generation would live better than the one before. That expectation is fading. Productivity growth has slowed to a crawl as Canadians work harder but produce less. Between 2015 and 2024, real GDP per capita grew by just 1.7 percent, compared to 18 percent in the United States. Business investment per worker has generally declined since 2014. Real wages have stagnated, affordability remains out of reach for too many families, and living standards are slipping. The consequences of stagnation are felt in the checkout line, the rent bill, and the growing strain on hospitals and schools, serving as everyday reminders that Canada is working harder just to stand still. The Hub’s Hunter Prize for Public Policy has framed this as Canada’s “wicked problem.” It’s wicked not only because of its consequences but because of its causes: slow investment, poor diffusion of innovation, weak competition, regulatory inertia, and skill mismatches all reinforce each other. There’s no single lever to pull. Addressing a problem that’s systemic and multi-causal requires a system-level solution. That’s why Canada needs a Canadian Productivity Commission (CPC): a permanent, independent institution devoted to understanding, measuring, and improving how Canadians create and share prosperity. Unlike proposals targeting a single or suite of reforms, a productivity commission would reform the machinery of policymaking itself. It would give Canada the institutional foundation to think, plan, and act on productivity continuously, not episodically. Canada’s governance framework was once better equipped to think long-term. The Economic Council of Canada, a Crown corporation abolished in 1993, provided quasi-independent economic analysis and strategic advice. In its absence, responsibility for productivity has splintered across departments: StatsCan, Finance, ISED, ESDC, Infrastructure, and others all play parts, but none lead or coordinate. Many of our domestic institutional precedents wouldn’t work either. A Crown corporation or agency like the Competition Bureau would remain under ministerial oversight. A royal commission would be temporary and costly. A quasi-judicial regulator like the CRTC participates in policymaking, which would compromise independence. And a think tank model would sit too far from government to influence decisions or draw on existing analytical capacity. The result has been fragmentation and drift. Canada reacts to symptoms rather than addressing root causes. We announce task forces, roundtables, and strategies that generate useful insights but recede once headlines fade. What’s missing is long-term institutional continuity in the form of a standing body with the independence, expertise, and credibility to bridge data and decision-making. If this sounds new, it isn’t. Australia’s Productivity Commission, founded in 1998, is globally recognized for producing transparent, evidence-based recommendations that successfully shape national policy. Its inquiries, conducted openly with public submissions, hearings, and interim reports, have informed durable reforms in education, health care, AI, and agriculture. New Zealand and the United Kingdom have adopted similar models with varying degrees of success. Their experience shows that independence, transparency, and a clear, closely followed mandate can depoliticize complex policy issues and sustain reform momentum. Yet while other countries have learned, adapted, and refined their approaches, Canada has stood still, reluctant to look outward as the evidence accumulates abroad. The country possesses world-class analytical capacity but lacks the institutional framework to channel it. The CPC would be overseen by a board of seven to nine commissioners, appointed by the governor-in-council following an open, independent recruitment process and consultations with party leaders in both Houses to ensure cross-party legitimacy and protection from executive influence. The Commission would be mandated to monitor, analyze, and advise on productivity policy across Canada, publishing annual State of Productivity reports, conducting public inquiries into key drivers like competition, regulation, and investment, and evaluating how federal and provincial initiatives affect long-term growth. Crucially, it would report directly to Parliament, not the executive, ensuring independence from day-to-day politics. Its forward-looking relationship with parliamentarians would mirror the PBO, which the OECD ranked in 2024 as the world’s top independent fiscal institution. A council of advisors representing business, labour, Indigenous organizations, academia, and civil society would ensure that research reflects diverse experiences and remains a genuinely national project. Reflecting Canada’s tradition of cooperative federalism, the CPC’s enabling legislation would also allow for joint inquiries to address cross-jurisdictional issues alongside provinces and territories, ensuring productivity reforms are impactful while respecting the autonomy of sub-national governments. At an estimated annual cost of $15 million, the CPC would be modest in size but high in impact—roughly double the PBO’s budget but far below Australia’s commission. Leveraging existing analytical capacity rather than duplicating it through data-sharing agreements, the CPC would generate outsized returns. Indeed, a sustained percentage-point increase in productivity growth could add billions to GDP within a decade. This proposal goes beyond technical fixes. It’s about creating a feedback loop between evidence and action—a way to make economic policy smarter, more transparent, and more continuous. The CPC would provide the permanence that single policy reforms cannot by keeping reform alive across election cycles. It would turn productivity from a political talking point into a national mission—a standing commitment to making Canada wealthier, fairer, and more future-ready. The international environment only raises the stakes. The rise of economic nationalism and protectionism, especially in the United States, has produced tariffs and industrial policies that distort trade and threaten Canadian workers and businesses. A more productive economy, one that innovates faster, produces more efficiently, and readily adopts new technology in a rapidly changing world, would better shield Canadians from these shocks and sustain living standards even as global competition intensifies. Carolyn Rogers is right: It’s time to break the glass. But emergency measures alone won’t suffice. What Canada needs is not another task force or program, but a system better built to learn—one that studies, tests, and refines our productivity strategy over time. The Canadian Productivity Commission would be that system: independent, transparent, and permanent. For the cost of a few government studies, Canada could gain the institutional capacity to finally turn insight into action. In tackling this wicked problem, we must think as big as the challenge itself. Productivity is not just an economic statistic, but the engine of living standards, social progress, and national confidence. By creating the CPC, Canada would begin closing the gap between potential and performance, maintaining the promise of progress in an increasingly uncertain world. Read the policy paper: