Financial District, Toronto. Photo by Sean X Liu/Flickr.

Lagging productivity has plagued the Canadian economy for generations. Over the last 50 years, Canada has slipped from being the sixth-most productive country in the OECD to the 18th. We are now 30 percent less productive than the United States. The Bank of Canada has described our national productivity decline as an emergency. Mark Carney, who has been wringing his hands about productivity since the Harper era, recently warned that diminished productivity is lowering living standards, straining government finances, and “starting to put at risk the social programs on which Canadians rely.”

It’s easy to bristle at this kind of discourse. The implication often seems to be that Canadian workers are lazy, that we’ve had it too good for too long, that we enjoy too many vacation days and hold too many rights.

But this interpretation misses the point officials are trying to make.

When economists and policy wonks bemoan Canada’s productivity, they’re generally not talking about labour discipline. The Bank of Canada is explicit: productivity hinges on a skilled workforce using cutting-edge technology. A lack of productivity in the private sector indicates that businesses have failed to adopt, develop, or deploy the tools and training necessary for workers to generate maximum value.

For the technocrats, the situation is clear: while Canadian workers push themselves to burnout, businesses are failing to hold up their end of the bargain. CEOs across the country have refused to modernize infrastructure, invest in R&D, or properly train their employees. Our sclerotic executive class is killing productivity in pursuit of short-term profits.

This isn’t a radical view. It has been the stance of some of the most pro-business analysts for decades—including Carney himself.

Back in 2010, when Carney was Governor of the Bank of Canada, he laid the blame for........

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