heureusement, ici, c'est james

"Canada-U.S. income gap widens" - Globe Report on Business, Nov. 18, 2007.

[According to the University of Toronto's Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity], Canada's “prosperity gap” with the United States was wider in 2006 than in previous years, and will continue to widen unless policy-makers and business leaders take significant steps to boost productivity.

Quick, somebody call the prosperity police.

"Canada-U.S. income gap narrows" - Globe Report on Business, Nov. 22, 2007.

[According to Statistics Canada] Canada's per capita real income grew by 15.5 per cent between 2000 and 2006, nearly two-thirds faster than the 9.1 per cent growth in the U.S.

Whoops, I guess we don't have to feel so poor and unwashed after all.

The Statscan report measured "real income growth," which measures the actual change in our purchasing power, while the first report focused on Canada's low productivity and manufacturing output per person.

So what we call "growth" in Canada has nothing to do with good economic planning or innovation at home. It's solely due to a rise in commodity prices, the fruits of which then finance our lucrative foreign investments.

In other words, In Canada, we're raping the Earth and proudly enjoying every minute of it. Not only are we making more money, but we're making more by doing less. We can sit and watch the world go round, extract a few somethings out of our home and native land, sell it to China or the US, and then use that money to cherry-pick a few sweet deals overseas. Then we move the money around a bit and buy a bigger set of widgets to stare at or drive in; and then we do it all over again, but with more gusto.

All the while, policy makers and business leaders are lamenting the fact that we don't manufacture anything of great value here at home.

Why bother?

We can't justifiably whine about Canada's low productivity while also celebrating globalization or the "integration of global markets" or whatever else we happen to enthusiastically call it on any given day. The whole point of globalization was to become a cog in the global economic machine! If we get rich just by digging in the dirt and finding shiny things, hard metals and combustible liquids, why should we have to do anything else?

In this machine, we have become a proud nation of extractor-investors. From here on in, we Canadians can officially retire our brains and just enjoy the widgetfest until the worlds melts into oblivion.

Labels: canada, environment, globalization, income gap, productivity, prosperity