Canada should be one of the world’s best countries to live in, and for many people it once was.  Possessing vast natural resources and reserves of energy (exceeding those of the U.S. on a per capita basis), endless natural space (as the world’s second largest country), adequate infrastructure, no enemies, a parliamentary democracy, and an educated population, it should face no problems beyond the winters.

But a decade under the former Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has reduced a first-world country to the level of a failing, although not yet a failed, state.  The strains of “O Canada” are giving way to cries of “Woe Canada,” while the recent book by the journalist Tristin Hopper (Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All at Once) documents the national malaise, with many examples of stagnation, incompetence, and folly.  Epithets such as “a woke dystopia” and “the sick man of North America” are now heard.  Where did it all go so wrong?

Canada’s most urgent self-inflicted problem is the stagnant economy, which has been ailing since 2015.  Canada has the largest increases in government spending and the second slowest growth in GDP per capita in the G7, averaging a mere 0.6% per annum for two decades, or half the U.S. rate.  Chronic under-investment has produced low productivity, and even government pension plans direct much of their investment toward more profitable U.S. companies in a slow death spiral as manufacturing capacity is hollowed out.  Business is mired in red tape, and the jobless rate is at 7%.

Household debt relative to GDP is the highest within the G7.  Gross national debt has grown faster than in all advanced countries for the last decade, now increasing at $109 million per day and amounting to over $40,000 per taxpayer for federal debt, plus a similar figure provincially.

The pale pink Liberal government under Mark Carney plans to run huge deficits for the next four years ($57 billion p.a.), much higher than under Trudeau, whose deficit for the last year before COVID was then the largest in seven years at a mere $25 billion.

The Canadian dollar, once at parity with the U.S., today is worth about 70 cents.  The economist Dave Chapple describes Canada as the “worst developed country in the world,” with

A second problem is bloated government and an unbound sense of entitlement among the nomenklatura.  Public........

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