Jack Mintz: Canada isn’t broken but it is badly mismanaged
Pierre Poilievre says Canada is broken. Polls say 70 per cent of Canadians agree. But what does that claim really mean?
Canada is one of the wealthiest countries in the world — with the ninth largest GDP and over 40 million people. Despite regional tensions, we have maintained our unity with a decentralized federation. We have welcomed and integrated millions of immigrants and helped win two world wars. We are a successful resource-based economy that has given the world energy, minerals food and wood products without suffering the “resource curse.” We have 14 corporations in Forbes’ global 500. We boast 28 Nobel Laureates, eighth best among countries, just behind Russia, just ahead of Switzerland. We have the 20th lowest level of income and wealth inequality among 196 countries in a recent report.
That doesn’t sound like a broken country to me. In the past decade, however, we have slipped badly. Our real per capita GDP, now 27th in the world, is only 73 per cent of the American level, the biggest gap since 1950. The IMF says we have the eighth least affordable housing market among 58 countries. Our health system, a key part of Canadian identity, is one of the most expensive in the world and ranks poorly in terms of quality, with burned-out staff, long wait times and poorly integrated services. With a stagnant standard of living and moribund investment climate in the past six years, rising unemployment since July 2022 and a half million unemployed young Canadians today, we have clearly lost our mojo.
None of this makes sense. How can a country that has been a great success for 150 years find itself stuck in quicksand? Canadians haven’t changed but their governments have. In the past decade, they have focused on dividing
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