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Canada’s economic challenge is not difficult to identify. The Bank of Canada has repeatedly warned about weak productivity. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (the OECD) made that central to its most recent assessment of Canada.

Across the policy spectrum, there is broad agreement about the symptoms: weak business investment; slow technology adoption; disappointing productivity growth; heavy reliance on the U.S. market; and an economy that has been too comfortable with underperformance for too long.

The problem is not that Canada is in crisis. It is that Canada is not in crisis.

This is what makes the country’s growth problem harder to solve. Canada remains wealthy, stable and highly livable. Its financial system is sound. Its institutions are strong. It has abundant natural resources, human capital and privileged access to the world’s largest market. These are real strengths. But they have also made it easier to postpone the necessary structural reform.

Message to the PM: adult supervision is needed here at home, too Canadians aren’t imagining the cost-of-living crisis The next frontier of AI is biological digital twins When talking about productivity, don’t forget art

Message to the PM: adult supervision is needed here at home, too

Canadians aren’t imagining the cost-of-living crisis

The next frontier of AI is biological digital twins

When talking about productivity, don’t forget art

Canada’s core economic problem is best understood not as a sudden decline but rather as relative stagnation under conditions of continued prosperity. The country has drifted into what might be called a comfort trap, where the economy creates a level of affluence strong enough to hide overall weak performance and stable enough to delay the reforms needed to restore long-term growth.

The result is not collapse. It is a gradual weakening of the mechanisms that generate sustained prosperity: productive investment, technology diffusion, commercialization, capital deepening and market diversification.

Change is essential and this is a good moment for Canada to act in five key areas:

creating a true national market with fewer interprovincial and other barriers;

moving more technological innovation from........

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