Canada has no core industries with a competitive edge except for resource extraction.
Bombardier tried and got fucked by the US.
Nortel tried and got fucked by China.
Blackberry tried and got fucked by itself.
Canada does have the potential for innovation, it just requires far more economic protectionism than most governments have the stomach for.
Today? I think Canada has a ton of potential if a few key categories without competition: agricultural technology, forestry technology, fisheries technology. Canada is also investing heavily into emerging fields like quantum computing and nuclear fusion. What’s missing is support for fields that are popular today: robotics, artificial intelligence, and skilled heavy manufacturing (trains, planes, etc.). That’s a problem.
Canada needs to better isolate it’s technology from competitors in the US and China. We can’t let them tear our companies to shreds.
very recently Industry Canada was trumpeting Canada’s advantages in AI. Many key researchers were at Canadian universities, so there was a pretty good R & D lead at one point.
Canada even has a “Scale AI” industrial supercluster.
Doesn’t really seem to be stimulating much public noise.
This country tries to be bigger than it is. On the flip side of the same coin it’s falsely perceived from the outside as bigger than it is. As if to be some sort of alt America. I think California alone is bigger or at least comparable to the entire country across many metrics. There is simply no amount of forcing or wishing or hoping some how this country can manifest the economic and industrial output to magically increase by orders of magnitude. Some times I wish everyone would get real about all this and treat it as it is. A small nation.
Canada and California both have 40 million people, but California’s economic output is nearly twice that of Canada’s. An order of magnitude growth is unlikely, but a doubling of our economic output is well within the realm of possibility.
We don’t have the culture for it, though.
A small nation sitting on enormous amounts of natural resources. It’s in the best interest of global corporations to keep our economy under a certain level … any higher and our resources become expensive for them. They don’t see our country filled with people … they see our country filled with natural wealth that’s ready to be extracted as cheaply as possible.
Investors won’t invest in Canadian tech because the regulatory environment won’t support it. Take iCraveTV. As soon as it started seeing a little bit of success, we changed the laws the kill it. Investment requires satiability. As such, the investment that does take place in Canada goes to the few places where there is commitment to providing that stability; which is a small handful of industries that have been around for centuries.
A strong regulatory environment fends off attacks from other countries. Imagine if Canada tried to pull that stunt on an American company. It’d be considered a declaration of war.
We bent over backwards to appease the Americans, only to see them allow Youtube to do almost exactly the same thing moments later…
You can’t invest in that kind of environment.
I work in R&D and we definitely see a stark difference between Canada and the US. US companies are more willing to invest in their employees and Canadian companies are more interested in cutting costs. We are hamstrung by our shortsightedness because we can’t compete with China/India on cost and we can’t compete with the US on productivity as a result.
“Persistently low productivity” sounds a lot like a euphemism for “workers are lazy” but when the owning class want an ever increasing portion of the surplus value of labour, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when nobody wants to perform said labour.
They could try paying people decent wages, which have been stagnating for 35 years. Maybe then they’ll be more motivated to be more productive.
which have been stagnating for 35 years.
In fairness, incomes have been stagnant since the dawn of time. Wages only saw a period of growth because wages were only invented a couple of hundred years ago. Selling time is a product of industrialization. Before that, people only sold things. Now that the vast majority of the population only sells their time, there is nowhere left for wages to go.
During the transition, if 90% of your income is from selling things and 10% selling your time the first year, 50% selling things and 50% selling your time the next year, and 100% selling your time in the third year – there’s your wage growth. 900% growth in just three years! How wonderful! Except your income didn’t change, so…
Wealth gap gets bigger and bigger, workers feel less and less secure in their jobs and lives, and companies try to blame the people who are making them rich.
Even worse, they inspire infighting between the working and “middle” class. A person making $100K a year is a lot closer to someone making $45K a year than the executives making many millions a year.
A person making $100K a year is a lot closer to someone making $45K a year than the executives making many millions a year.
Not really, because someone making $100k per year has $55k each year to invest in capital. And capital compounds. 20 years later that person will be making millions per year too, while the person making $45k is forever stuck there with no opportunity for escape.
Like you pointed out yourself, it is the wealth gap, not the income gap, that is pertinent.
I can agree with that overall.
But in this specific case (the link in OP), the discussion is centred around employee/employer relations. In that context it’s employee compensation that seems more relevant to the discussion.
Employers have control over how much they pay people, so if they are complaining about “lazy people”, it feels fair to point out lowered compensation and benefits year over year if you factor in inflation.
