Canada is a Warning to the Rest of the World!

Canada is a Warning to the Rest of the World!

Patrick Boyle

0:00 About a month ago, I made a video called

0:02 The UK is a warning to the rest of the world.

0:05 It was about the entirely avoidable economic stagnation

0:08 that overtook what was once the world's preeminent industrial power.

0:13 The comment section of that video was unusually lively,

0:17 but some comments really stood out.

0:20 A lot of my viewers were saying some version of just

0:23 change the name of the country and you've basically described Canada.

0:27 They said this, it should be noted very politely.

0:31 So today, let's talk about Canada.

0:34 Now, back in 2012, a comparison like that would have seemed absurd.

0:39 At that point, the global consensus on Canada was

0:42 that it was the ultimate best of all worlds economy.

0:46 It had the natural resources of a Gulf state,

0:48 the social safety net of a northern European country,

0:52 and a housing market that only seemed to move in one direction.

0:56 Canada is a country that on paper should

0:59 be one of the wealthiest nations on earth.

1:02 It has the second largest land mass in the world.

1:05 It holds the third largest proven oil reserves.

1:08 It's fifth in natural gas.

1:10 It has an abundance of uranium potach, rare earth minerals and fresh water.

1:16 It has a highly educated population,

1:18 a stable democracy, rule of law and G7 membership.

1:23 By every measure of endowment, Canada should be a superpower.

1:28 In fact, there was a brief window in 2012 where

1:31 the median Canadian household actually pulled ahead of its American counterpart,

1:37 becoming by several measures the most affluent middle class in the world.

1:42 Looking back from 2026,

1:44 it's clear that this outperformance was driven by a unique set of circumstances.

1:49 It was the height of a global commodity

1:51 boom where crude oil prices had nearly quadrupled

1:54 over a decade and the Canadian dollar was

1:57 trading at or above parody with the US dollar.

2:01 While high energy prices were a headwind for the US,

2:04 they were a massive tailwind for Canada.

2:08 But if you look at the data today, that era of outperformance has vanished.

2:13 The decline isn't marked by a sudden collapse or a dramatic crisis.

2:18 It's a slow but always polite stagnation.

2:21 Between 2012 and today,

2:24 Canada has fallen from number six on the World Happiness Index to number 25,

2:29 its lowest ranking since the survey began.

2:32 To see a national mood sour this quickly,

2:35 you usually have to look at countries whose central banks have

2:38 been replaced by printing presses or whose borders are being redrawn.

2:43 In Canada, the institutions are still there and the borders haven't moved.

2:48 It's just that the arithmetic of a middle

2:50 class life has slowly stopped balancing.

2:54 National income per head has fallen from roughly 80% of the American

2:59 level in the decade before the pandemic to around 70% today.

3:04 If Canadian provinces were American states, Alberta,

3:08 the oil rich outlier, would rank around 20th wealthiest.

3:12 somewhere between Colorado and Tennessee.

3:15 Ontario, Canada's most populous and economically

3:19 central province, would rank 48,

3:22 below Montana, below Alabama, and below every southern state except Mississippi.

3:28 New Brunswick would rank dead last, below Mississippi.

3:32 The provinces that contain most of Canada's population

3:36 sit near the bottom of the combined list.

3:39 A country that was briefly richer per capita than the United States is

3:44 now having a serious debate about whether it can arrest a generational decline.

3:49 The British disease that I described last

3:52 month was an object lesson in compounding errors.

3:55 But Canada's version of this stagnation is unique.

3:59 It's a story of how a country

4:01 with every possible advantage managed to fall into what

4:05 Bank of Canada senior deputy governor Caroline Rogers

4:09 called in a 2024 speech a productivity emergency.

4:13 The reason I think the rest of the world should

4:16 pay attention to Canada is not that Canada is failing spectacularly.

4:21 It is failing gradually, systematically, and in ways that are entirely legible.

4:27 Compounding errors that reinforce each other,

4:29 each one individually defensible collectively ruin us.

4:34 The same patterns are visible in countries across the developed world.

4:39 Canada just got there first.

4:41 So, let's go through them.

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6:23 Consider a thought experiment.

6:25 Imagine a professional sports league where the same

6:28 three or four teams win every year.

6:31 They have the largest stadiums,

6:32 the biggest TV deals, and the most expensive players.

6:36 The other teams are technically allowed to compete,

6:39 but the rules of the game have been structured over

6:42 the decades to make it very difficult for anyone new to enter.

6:47 What tends to happen over time is not just that the incumbents win,

6:51 it's that the whole quality of play declines.

6:54 Without genuine competitive pressure, there's no incentive to innovate,

6:59 to take risks, or to improve.

7:01 Canada's domestic economy has in several of its most important

7:06 sectors been running this kind of league for 30 years.

7:10 Take telecommunications.

7:12 Canada has three dominant carriers, Bell, Rogers, and Telus,

7:17 who collectively hold roughly 89% of wireless subscribers.

7:22 Canada has, as a result,

7:24 some of the highest mobile phone bills in the developed world.

7:28 A comparable unlimited data plan costs roughly twice

7:31 as much in Canada as in the UK or France.

7:34 The Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission or the CRTC,

7:40 which is what you'd call it if you'd like to get home before midnight,

7:44 has for years been theoretically open to new entrance.

7:48 But the practical and regulatory barriers have

7:52 ensured that meaningful competition never quite materialized.

7:56 The industry has spent lavishly on lobbying and regulatory intervention.

8:01 It spends rather less on network investment per

8:04 customer than its counterparts in more competitive markets.

8:09 Banking tells a similar story.

8:11 Five Canadian banks, the Royal Bank, TD, Scotia Bank,

8:16 and CIBC hold approximately 90% of deposits in the country.

8:22 The Canadian banking system is by design highly stable.

8:26 It didn't have a financial crisis in 2008 unlike most of the developed world.

8:32 This is a genuine achievement and Canadian bankers

8:35 will remind you of it at every available opportunity.

8:39 But stability and dynamism are not the same thing.

8:43 A concentrated banking sector allocates capital conservatively.

8:48 It lends to proven assets, existing real estate,

8:51 established corporations rather than to new ventures.

8:55 The startup ecosystem that Canada has quietly built, particularly in AI,

9:01 has often found that the most growthoriented capital came from American funds,

9:07 not from Bay Street.

9:09 The pattern repeats in airlines, in groceries, and in broadcasting.

9:14 A small number of large incumbents protected by ownership restrictions,

9:19 regulatory capture or both extract returns from a captive domestic market.

9:25 The economist's term for this is rent seeking.

9:28 The polite Canadian term is a stable industry.

9:32 The consequence is that Canada's labor productivity,

9:36 the output generated per hour worked,

9:39 has declined relative to American productivity over time.

9:43 In 1997, the productivity gap was narrower.

9:47 Since then, the two economies have

9:49 diverged by a cumulative 26 percentage points.

9:53 Canada has not become less productive in absolute terms.

9:56 It's simply failed to keep pace with an economy

10:00 where competitive pressure is significantly higher and where

10:03 venture capital has directed hundreds of billions of dollars

10:06 into the highest productivity sectors of the global economy.

10:10 Canada spends less than half the OECD average

10:14 on research and development as a share of GDP,

10:18 a figure that has been below the average for two decades running.

10:22 There's also the question of internal trade.

10:25 Canada has a free trade agreement with the United States,

10:29 Mexico, the European Union, and most of Asia-Pacific.

10:33 It does not have a fully functioning free trade agreement with itself.

10:37 a structural curiosity that has persisted in various forms since Confederation.

10:43 In January 2005, the average Canadian home sold for $237,000 Canadian.

10:51 By early 2026, the average had reached $661,000,

10:57 a nominal increase of around $179% or nearly tripling in price.

11:04 Even adjusted for inflation, the gain is still huge.

11:08 In the country's largest cities, it's been transformational.

11:12 Now, there's a common comparison made in conversations about Canadian

11:16 housing that homes have outperformed the stock market over time.

11:21 It's worth pausing on this.

11:22 On a straight price appreciation basis,

11:25 the TSX composite index actually outperformed Canadian housing over

11:30 the same period and substantially so once dividends are reinvested.

11:35 The point is not therefore that housing beats stocks.

11:39 The point is that housing performed like

11:41 an equity investment in a non-productive asset.

11:45 A company when it rises in value has generally done so by producing something,

11:51 a product, a service, a patent, a drug, a piece of software.

11:56 The stock price reflects real economic activity, real production.

12:01 A house, when it rises in value,

12:03 has generally done so because land in a desirable location has become scarcer,

12:09 because planning restrictions have constrained supply,

12:11 or because a decade of historically low interest rates

12:15 created a wall of capital seeking somewhere to go.

12:19 The house didn't invent anything.

12:22 It didn't employ a research team.

12:24 It just sat there.

12:26 This distinction matters because of leverage.

12:29 If you bought a Toronto home in 2005

12:32 for $300,000 with a 20% deposit, so $60,000 down,

12:38 and that home is now worth around $900,000,

12:42 your original $60,000 has generated a capital gain of $600,000.

12:50 That is a 10:1 return on the actual cash invested.

12:54 It's also in Canada entirely tax-free if it was your primary residence.

13:00 If you had instead taken that same $60,000 and put it into a TSX index fund,

13:06 it would be worth roughly $195,000 today.

13:11 A solid result, but it gets diluted because of capital gains tax on the profit.

13:16 The incentive structure this creates is problematic.

13:20 The rational economic choice for a Canadian household with savings

13:25 has been for 20 years to put as much money

13:27 as possible into real estate as early as possible

13:31 at as high a leverage ratio as your bank will allow.

13:35 This is not irrational behavior.

13:37 It's an entirely logical response to the incentives that the system created.

13:42 It is after all how everyone you know made most of their money.

13:47 The consequences of this are considerable.

13:50 Housing prices in Canada's major cities now sit

13:54 at somewhere between 12 and 17 times median household income.

13:58 The median after tax income for a Canadian

14:01 individual in 2023 was $74,000 a year.

14:06 At the national average price of $661,000,

14:11 the price to income ratio is approximately 9.

14:14 In Toronto and Vancouver, it's substantially higher.

14:18 In 2020 and 2021, CIBC estimated that roughly onethird of firsttime

14:25 buyers received a parental gift to fund their down payment.

14:29 The average amount was $82,000 Canadian,

14:33 which as it happens is slightly more than

14:35 the median Canadian individual's annual after tax income.

14:40 In Vancouver, the average parental gift was $180,000 Canadian.

14:46 In Toronto, it exceeded $130,000.

14:50 The Bank of Mom and Dad has in certain

14:52 Canadian cities become the largest mortgage lender in the country.

14:57 It doesn't, however, publish accounts.

15:00 Amusingly, in researching this, I found a Canadian real

15:04 estate industry publication where the author argued that what Canada's

15:09 housing market needed was further tax relief for property owners

15:14 on the grounds that this would stimulate more housing transactions.

15:18 I don't like to beat up on someone,

15:20 but consider the environment in which it's being made.

15:24 The average home in Vancouver costs more than 17 times the average income.

15:30 The suggested solution is to make property ownership

15:33 even more tax advantage than it already is.

15:36 This is a bit like a doctor seeing a patient

15:39 with high blood pressure and suggesting that they eat more salt.

15:43 Technically, it will do something.

15:45 It's just not obvious that the something is helpful.

15:49 The political economy of this situation is almost perfectly paralyzed.

15:54 Approximately 66% of Canadian households own their own homes,

16:00 meaning that 2/3 of the electorate have

16:02 a direct financial stake in keeping house prices high.

16:06 A government that credibly committed to building sufficient new

16:10 housing to return prices to something resembling affordability would be

16:15 asking a majority of its voters to accept a substantial

16:19 reduction in the value of their single largest asset.

16:22 In Britain, we identified this as the central

16:25 political obstacle to housing reform.

16:28 In Canada, the problem is essentially identical.

16:32 The 2026 World Happiness Report contains

16:35 a data point that I find genuinely striking.

16:39 Canada overall ranks 25th, which is a significant fall from sixth a decade ago,

16:45 but still a respectable position for a country

16:48 that is by any objective standard wealthy, peaceful, and well-governed.

16:53 But when you break this down by age, the picture changes substantially.

16:58 Canadians over 60 rank in the global top 10 for happiness.

17:04 Canadians under 25 rank 71st.

17:08 71st below countries with a fraction of Canada's per capita income.

17:14 That ranking reflects not just where Canada stands, but how fast it has fallen.

17:20 The World Happiness Report tracks the decline

17:22 in youth happiness since 2011 across 136 countries.

17:28 Of those, only three recorded a steeper dropped than Canada,

17:32 Malawi, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.

17:35 One of the three has a poverty rate above 70%.

17:39 One has been in active armed conflict.

17:42 One is governed by the Taliban.

17:45 Canada is the fourth.

17:47 There's a clean explanation for this divergence and it is the housing market.

17:53 Older Canadians who bought homes in the 1980s,

17:56 1990s or early 2000s have through the entirely normal process of sitting

18:02 in their houses accumulated wealth that would

18:05 have been the envy of a successful entrepreneur.

18:08 The median senior family in Canada holds

18:11 net assets of approximately 1.1 million Canadian dollars.

18:16 The median family, where the main earner is under 35,

18:20 holds approximately $159,000.

18:24 This is not because young Canadians are less capable,

18:28 less hardworking, or less disciplined.

18:30 It's because the asset that generated extraordinary

18:33 returns for the previous generation is now priced at a level that makes it

18:38 structurally inaccessible without either a very high income,

18:42 a parental transfer, or both.

18:45 Youth unemployment reached 14.7% in late 2025.

18:50 Approximately 914,000 young Canadians,

18:54 just under a million were classified as need,

18:58 not in employment, education, or training.

19:02 This is the mechanism of generational wealth

19:05 transfer that the housing market has created.

19:08 It's not a conspiracy.

19:10 Nobody designed it this way.

19:12 It's simply the predictable outcome of a set of policies,

19:16 planning restrictions, tax treatment of primary residents, mortgage incentives,

19:20 and low interest rates that happen to be

19:23 extremely good for people who owned assets

19:26 25 years ago and are considerably less

19:29 good for people trying to acquire assets today.

19:33 It also incidentally explains why the country's

19:37 most talented young people increasingly looks out.

19:41 Which brings me briefly to Elon Musk.

19:44 Elon Musk was born in South Africa.

19:46 At 17, he moved to Canada where he held citizenship through his mother

19:51 and stayed for approximately 2 years before relocating to the United States.

19:56 He's now variously the world's richest person, the owner of Twitter,

20:00 which he acquired for 44 billion and renamed X and a figure

20:05 of considerable political controversy in the country that eventually kept him.

20:10 I bring him up not as evidence of Canada's loss,

20:14 but because of the underlying pattern.

20:17 Talented individual arrives in Canada, acquires residency,

20:21 departs for the United States for better economic opportunities.

20:25 There's nothing really unusual about this story.

20:29 It is in fact the dominant finding

20:31 of a July 2025 Statistics Canada study on skilled immigration.

20:37 The study found that roughly 22,000 to 35,000

20:42 Canadians move to the United States each year.

20:45 More striking, about 60% of those applying for US

20:49 work authorization from Canada are not Canadian-born at all.

20:54 their skilled immigrants who came to Canada first and subsequently moved on.

20:59 The median US salary offer

21:01 for these individuals was $137,000 primarily in computer,

21:08 mathematical and engineering fields.

21:11 Canada attracted them, educated them in some cases and then lost them

21:15 to a market that paid more and taxed less.

21:18 The conference board has called this the leaky bucket problem.

21:23 Canada has one of the world's most generous immigration systems.

21:26 It brings in large numbers of highly educated people,

21:30 but one in five skilled immigrants leaves within 25

21:34 years with the highest attrition in the first 5 years,

21:37 precisely when they're the most economically mobile and most

21:41 likely to be comparing their Canadian prospects to their alternatives.

21:46 Canada is not on this evidence suffering

21:49 from a brain drain in the classic sense.

21:52 It's functioning as a very efficient

21:54 talent incubator for the United States economy,

21:58 which is a service, I suppose, just not one that Canada intended to provide.

22:03 Since 1997, Canadian labor productivity has fallen

22:07 progressively behind that of the United States.

22:10 The cumulative gap is now approximately 26 percentage points.

22:15 To put that in terms that I think are more intuitive,

22:18 for every dollar of output generated by an American worker in an hour,

22:22 a Canadian worker generates roughly 74 cents.

22:26 This is not a story about working less.

22:29 Hours worked per Canadian are broadly comparable to those in the United States.

22:34 It's a story about where those hours have been directed.

22:38 The economy has channeled its investment, human, financial,

22:42 and physical into sectors that produce lower output per unit of effort.

22:47 Real estate, public administration, retail,

22:51 and the financial sector that lends against bricks rather than ideas.

22:56 Canada's business investment in research and development as a share

23:00 of GDP has been below the OECD average for 20 consecutive years.

23:05 The gap between Canadian and American R&D

23:08 spending per capita is large and widening.

23:12 A country that doesn't invest in the production

23:15 of new knowledge or new processes eventually finds

23:18 that its workers are doing the same things in the same ways as a generation ago,

23:23 which is roughly what has happened.

23:26 There is a further structural point worth

23:29 making about the composition of the workforce.

23:32 Between 2015 and 2025,

23:35 public sector employment in Canada grew by approximately 30%.

23:40 I'm not arguing that public servants don't provide valuable services.

23:44 Many of them do.

23:46 It's just worth noting that a growing share

23:48 of the highest security employment in Canada is

23:51 in sectors that do not by definition produce exportable

23:56 goods or generate productivity growth in the conventional sense.

24:00 The Bank of Canada's most recent forecast

24:03 for real economic growth is 1.25% annually.

24:08 For an economy with Canada's endowments, that is unimpressive.

24:13 Approximately 75% of Canada's exports go to the United States.

24:18 For reference, total merchandise exports to the US

24:22 represent roughly onethird of Canadian GDP.

24:26 No other developed economy is so

24:28 comprehensively tethered to a single trading partner.

24:32 This concentration was for a very long time a reasonable arrangement.

24:37 The United States was a stable rules-based market.

24:41 The two countries shared a border, a language,

24:44 a legal tradition, and a broadly aligned foreign policy.

24:48 NAFTA and later the USMCA provided a framework of predictability.

24:54 Canadian businesses rationally chose not to spend money developing Asian

24:59 or European market access when the American market was so large,

25:04 so close, and so accessible.

25:06 The problem with concentrating your economic

25:09 exposure to a single counterparty is

25:11 that you're entirely dependent on that counterparty's

25:14 goodwill and continuity of policy.

25:18 Recent events have illustrated this risk with some emphasis.

25:22 Nowhere is Canada's strategic exposure more visible than in energy.

25:27 Canada holds the world's third largest proven oil reserves.

25:31 The vast majority in the Alberta oil sands.

25:35 The United States is the overwhelmingly dominant customer.

25:39 Because Canada has historically lacked sufficient tidewater

25:43 export infrastructure to access Asian or European markets,

25:48 it has sold oil at a consistent discount to the global benchmark price.

25:53 WCS is a heavy sour crude,

25:56 more expensive to refine than the lighter American benchmark,

26:00 and some discount is structurally warranted.

26:03 But the historical gap of $15 to $20 per barrel

26:07 was consistently larger than the quality differential alone would justify.

26:12 The excess reflects a transportation premium that acrewed

26:16 not to Canada but to the American

26:18 Midwest refiners who for decades were the only buyers with ready access.

26:24 The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion entered commercial service in May 2024.

26:31 It added approximately 590,000 barrels per day of capacity,

26:36 bringing total Trans Mountain capacity to around 890,000 barrels per day.

26:42 The WCS WTI discount has narrowed since then

26:47 from roughly $19.82 to around $1252 per barrel.

26:54 This is progress.

26:56 The pipeline cost approximately 34 billion Canadian dollars to build

27:01 against an original 2012 estimate of 5.4 billion Canadian dollars.

27:07 That is a cost overrun of roughly 530%.

27:12 It remains one of the more spectacular

27:14 infrastructure project management failures in recent Canadian history,

27:20 but it is built and it is moving oil to tide water.

27:24 The more interesting counterfactual is Energy East.

27:28 Energy East was a proposed 4,600 kilometer pipeline that would

27:33 have carried 1.1 million barrels per day from Alberta to St.

27:38 John, New Brunswick.

27:39 The Canaport terminal at St.

27:42 John had already received 300 million Canadian

27:45 dollars in upgrades and can accommodate super tankers,

27:49 much larger vessels than those serviced by the Vancouver terminus.

27:54 Energy East would have opened Atlantic

27:56 and European markets in addition to Asian ones.

28:00 It was cancelled in October 2017 following years of regulatory review,

28:05 shifting political winds, and organized opposition.

28:09 Several Canadians I spoke to in researching

28:12 this video described the cancellation as the single most consequential strategic

28:17 error in recent Canadian economic history.

28:20 Canada also has internal trade barriers that function,

28:24 according to the IMF, like a 6.9% tariff on domestic commerce.

28:30 A wine producer in British Columbia cannot

28:33 easily sell to a restaurant in Ontario.

28:36 A construction worker licensed in Alberta may

28:39 need to re-qualify to work in Quebec.

28:42 A medical device cleared in one province requires reapproval in another.

28:47 Eliminating these barriers, which has the support of 95% of Canadians,

28:53 according to polling by Angus Reed, could, according to various estimates,

28:58 add between 90 billion and 200 billion per year to GDP.

29:03 This has been known for decades, but the barriers remain.

29:06 On the topic of trade balance,

29:09 Canada runs a goods trade surplus with the United States,

29:13 but it runs an overall current account

29:15 deficit when you include services and investment income.

29:20 This distinction matters because Canada is sometimes characterized in trade

29:24 discussions as a surplus economy in the Chinese mold.

29:28 This is not accurate.

29:30 Canada runs structural deficits in services, in tourism,

29:35 in intellectual property, in financial services that offset its good surplus.

29:41 Canada is in aggregate a net importer.

29:45 It is not a mercantalist economy systematically accumulating

29:49 foreign reserves at the expense of its trading partners.

29:53 It's a country that sells raw materials and manufactures less than it buys.

29:58 I've spent the better part of this video cataloging what's gone wrong.

30:03 In the interest of intellectual honesty,

30:05 I should spend some time on what is not.

30:08 The FT's TE Periq in two pieces that I would recommend to anyone

30:13 thinking seriously about Canada's economic position makes

30:16 a point that I think is underappreciated.

30:20 Canada's endowments are extraordinary.

30:23 It has the resources, the institutions, the human capital,

30:26 and the geographic position to be

30:29 not merely a well-functioning midsized economy,

30:32 but as Periq puts it, a genuine economic superpower.

30:36 Canada's endowments, as I described at the outset, are extraordinary.

30:41 The kind that most countries would consider a permanent structural advantage.

30:46 What's less well understood is

30:47 the institutional capital that sits alongside them.

30:51 The Maple Aid, Canada's eight largest pension funds,

30:55 collectively manage around 1.6 trillion Canadian dollars in assets.

31:00 They are amongst the most sophisticated institutional investors in the world.

31:05 If structured as a sovereign wealth fund,

31:08 they would be the third largest in the world.

31:10 Canada's university system produces

31:13 by international standards excellent graduates.

31:17 A 2025 survey suggested that approximately 17 million university educated

31:23 people globally would choose to move to Canada if they could.

31:27 Canada's AI research ecosystem centered on Montreal,

31:32 Toronto, and the Vector Institute is genuinely worldclass.

31:36 Jeffrey Hinton, Yosua Benjio, and Richard Sutton,

31:41 three of the most consequential figures in the development of modern AI,

31:45 all did their foundational work in Canada.

31:48 The country has something real to build on.

31:51 Canada also holds the G7's lowest net debt to GDP

31:56 ratio and deficit as a share of the economy.

31:59 Its fiscal position is relative to peers a genuine strength which

32:04 means that it has the capacity to invest if it chooses to.

32:09 The question is whether external pressure might finally produce

32:13 the internal reforms that domestic politics have persistently failed to deliver.

32:18 There is some reason to think that it might.

32:21 The trade tensions of recent years have created in Canada a political consensus

32:26 around economic self-sufficiency that was absent

32:30 for most of the last three decades.

32:32 The internal trade barrier discussion which has been

32:36 a polite academic conversation for decades suddenly became urgent.

32:41 The pipeline question acquired new political salience.

32:45 Periq's phrase that Canada has spent too long being

32:48 a client state and branch plant economy of the United States

32:52 which would have been controversial to say even 5 years

32:55 ago is now being quoted in the House of Commons.

32:59 The case for optimism then is not that Canada will automatically get better.

33:04 It's that the conditions that might force it to try,

33:08 external shock, generational transfer of political power,

33:12 a recognition that the status quo is no longer sustainable,

33:16 are for the first time in a generation in place simultaneously.

33:21 Crises, as it turns out, are occasionally useful.

33:25 If you found this interesting, you should watch my video on the UK next.

33:30 The structural parallels are fascinating.

33:32 Don't forget to check out our sponsor, GenSpark AAI,

33:36 using the link in the video description and see you in the next video.

33:40 Bye.

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