There Is No Canadian Exceptionalism

But don't take my word for it:

Most vehicles in cabinet’s multi-million dollar motor pool are American made, records show. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had pledged to ensure “vehicles of the future are made right here in Canada.”

 

(Sidebar: Mr. No Core Identity himself.)

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A federal board is reviewing posthumous honours for Alexander Graham Bell due to his “controversial beliefs,” according to records. Bell died a hundred years ago. Designation of Canadian landmarks like the Halifax Citadel and Crowsnest Pass are also up for review under a cabinet policy against “colonialism, patriarchy and racism.”

Because the Year Zero.

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The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is essentially a club of the world’s 38 most developed countries. And when these 38 are ranked against each other for housing unaffordability, Canada emerges as the clear champion. OECD analysts rank affordability by comparing average home prices to average incomes, and according to their latest quarterly rankings Canada was No. 1 for salaries that were most out of whack with the cost of a home. ...

Canada’s health system was particularly walloped by COVID-19 due to the simple fact that most of our hospitals are at the breaking point even in good times. Multiple times during the pandemic, provinces were forced into shutdown by rates of COVID that had barely been noticed in better-prepared countries. A ranking by the Canadian Institute for Health Information provides one clue as to why. When ranked against peer countries, Canada’s rate of per-capita acute care beds was in last place, albeit tied with Sweden. Canada has two acute care beds for every 1,000 people, against 3.1 in France and six in Germany. ...

The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in the most feverish global accumulation of debt in the history of human civilization. So it’s rather remarkable that amidst this international monsoon of debt, Canada still managed to out-debt everyone else. Last year, analysts at Bloomberg tracked each country’s rate of public and private debt accumulated during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Canada came in with an overall debt burden equivalent to 352 per cent of GDP. While a handful of countries (Japan, France and Hong Kong) came out of the pandemic with higher overall debt burdens, Canada outranked all of them when it came to how quickly that debt had been accumulated. ...

A 2020 study out of the University of Calgary tracked foreign investment flows into a cross-section of developed countries between 2015 and 2019. Virtually every country on the list saw a surge in foreign cash during that period; Ireland topped out the ranking thanks to its foreign investment climbing by more than 115 per cent. Only four countries actually saw a reduction in foreign investment: Mexico, Brazil, Australia and Canada. A report by the Business Council of Canada noticed the same trend. “Canada is the second-worst in the OECD on openness to foreign direct investment,” it concluded.

Oh, I suppose that Canada is exceptional ... in being the worst.