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Minimal Gravitas's avatar

Dude if you thought like an economist you wouldn’t say such stupid things. Go talk to an actual economist and you will get a clearer understanding of where Canadian productivity actually lags, what reasonable approaches there are to fixing productivity growth (you think the Canadian public service / central bank aren’t AWARE of this ?! Get real! The analysis is out there!) and what the sources of our lags are.

Meanwhile - annex a country? Follow the U.S. lead in extorting poor countries for their minerals (hello there are hella minerals in Canada without embarrassing ourselves abroad). What are you *talking* about?! Thiel fellowships? You think those fellowships are the font of American productivity gains? Get real. Read the Draghi Report, as it also identifies how much of the U.S.’s comparative productivity gains are driven entirely by Silicon Valley and Wall Street (and incidentally, wildly geographically concentrated).

There are loads of great things we could be doing and I agree that Canadians have been too timid and complacent, but honestly you need to talk with some actually informed people to help dislodge this sophomoric drivel. You need to actually have a serious person’s understanding of the sources of both American and Canadian productivity before you can say anything meaningful about either.

Lastly and least importantly, I’m afraid that your own ambivalence about sport means you’ve misunderstood why Canadians are still savouring the hockey game. Symbolism in sports matters. Trump phoned the team the day of the game and in the same breath spoke of annexing Canada. The U.S. has a similar number of (not-quite-as-rabid) hockey fans but spread out over a far greater population. U.S. sports media were highly invested in the tournament, especially for the final. If the U.S. had won we’d never hear the end of it from those fans. (There was A LOT of talk after they won their first encounter, if you recall.) Their silence is the silence of defeat. Canadians still talk about it because they are savouring how delicious a moment it was- they are as loud as the cowed Americans are silent. Canada absolutely needs to get its economic house in order, but 20 million hockey fans on both sides of the border know that when it comes to hockey, Canada is still daddy.

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Schevchenko Bulba's avatar

Great analysis of the strange Canadian cope recently. I like the slant of your ideas for Canadian prosperity but I'm forced to wonder why the government undertaking massive soviet style mega projects is the answer? Simply follow the Austrian school: Abolish taxes. Canada can be put on the track to immense wealth overnight. I guarantee highly capable entrepreneurs will immigrate (and you don't even have to take hundreds of thousands from the people to make them.) Anyways, great article.

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