We are obviously facing an economic growth crisis

The Fraser Institute of Vancouver, one of the outstanding public policy think-tanks of North America, last week issued a summary entitled “24 facts for 2024 — Canadians should understand the impact of government policies,” and the message is sobering. I am much indebted to Fraser’s Niels Veldhuis and Peter Brown for most of the statistics in this column. Fraser starts with the distressing statement that while per capita income in Canada has effectively stagnated from 2016 to 2022, moving only three per cent from $54,154 to $55,863, the United States per capita income in the same time has risen more than four times as much, from $65,792 to $73,565. “The average Canadian now earns $17,700 less than the average American.” According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Canada will be the worst-performing advanced economy in the world from 2020 all the way to 2060.

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Canada is obviously facing an economic growth crisis, primarily due to the decline in business investment, which is in itself the inevitable consequence which has been widely predicted (including in this column), of federal government policies that could not have produced an alternative result. Investment per employed person “declined by 20 per cent from 2014 to 2022, from $18,363 to $14,687” in Canada, the report finds. “In 2014, Canada invested about $0.79 per worker for every dollar invested in the United States.” In 2021, the Fraser Institute deduced, the corresponding figure was $0.55 per employed person.

For all of its history, Canada has been obsessed with distinguishing itself from the United States, and has snuffled about to find reasons to justify its existence as an independent country, considering the evident similarities between English-speaking Canadians and Americans from northern American states. We have successively worked the British and monarchical connection, the French fact, the supposed........

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