Forget identity politics — growth and investment must be Canada’s top priorities: Jack Mintz

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

Canadians’ real per capita incomes have stalled in the past five years, but that hasn’t been the case in other rich countries

By Jack Mintz

Last week, I wrote about Canada’s poor economic performance over the past five years compared to the United States and other industrialized countries. To recap, Canada’s standard of living has been becalmed, “as a painted ship upon a paint ocean.” Sure, we went through a bad year with the pandemic in 2020. So did other countries. Yet, we fell behind. Over the last five years, as our growth stalled, U.S. per capita GDP grew 9.3 per cent, the OECD average 5.6 per cent, resource-rich Australia 4.8 per cent and Ireland an astonishing 31 per cent.

According to IMF statistics, our share of world GDP (in purchasing-power-parity dollars), has fallen six per cent, from 1.44 per cent in 2018 to 1.36 per cent in 2023. We shouldn’t even be a G7 country anymore: in PPP dollars our economy is only the world’s 16th biggest, right behind Spain.

But that’s the past. What about the future? In 2021, the OECD projected that our economy would perform worse this decade than all other member countries, with per capita real GDP growing only 0.7 per cent annually — though at least that would be an improvement over the past five years. The big question is why Canada is at the bottom of the heap. There are several reasons:

• The demographic time bomb: Economic growth will be more challenging this decade as many boomers retire and begin supporting their consumption by cashing in pension and other assets. Many other high-income countries, no different than Canada, are also aging rapidly, with retirees rising from roughly 25 per cent of the working population in 2020 to 40 per cent in 2035. With fewer people working and saving, GDP per capita will naturally decline (even if GDP per worker rises). Canada traditionally has been able to attract younger immigrants to make up for the output loss but international markets for skilled labour are increasingly competitive as workers, including ones born in Canada, pick and choose the country they feel offers them the best opportunities.

• Indebtedness: With interest rates higher than they have been, indebtedness also hurts economic growth. To cope with higher payments on mortgages and consumer debt, households, corporations and governments will deleverage by consuming fewer goods and services. Canada’s governments may be carrying less debt than their U.S. and G7 counterparts, but Canadian households and corporations are carrying more — fully 216 per cent of GDP in 2022, compared to 186 in Japan, 153 in the U.S., 150 in the U.K., 127 in German and just 110 per cent in Italy. Only France, with private debts equal to 228 per cent of its GDP, will experience a greater debt drag on growth than we will.

• Shrinking world trade: Growing protectionism will especially hurt countries that rely, as we do, on trade as a source of economic growth. We currently export 33 per cent of GDP, primarily to the U.S. Geo-political tensions and decoupling from China will hit us harder than other places, like the U.S., where trade matters less.

• A costly energy transition: The extraordinary cost of building new transportation, heating and industrial energy systems over the next few years won’t realize benefits for decades, if at all. The highest value-added per working hour in 2022 was earned in non-conventional oil extraction at $997 — more than 16 times the average of all industries ($61) and almost five times more than in mining ($205). Shifting labour out of an activity where value-added is that high means GDP will surely fall.

Energy is our largest source of export earnings so any reduction in exports will push the Canadian dollar down. With the federal government hell-bent on stopping new fossil-fuel development, especially of liquified natural gas, we will spend the next couple of decades throwing away wealth that could provide income to Canadians and taxes for governments. Our ideologically driven energy transition will cause us to lag countries like the U.S., Norway and Australia, which continue to develop and export energy while also working on clean technologies.

New technologies: The coming decade does offer the growth-friendly promise of new technologies. AI, continuing digitization and any number of innovations we can’t anticipate will allow us to produce more with the resources we have. On the other hand, adopting new technologies requires investing in new capital. And this is where Canada is weak. Since 2018 Canadian corporate investment has been about 10 per cent of GDP — almost a fifth below the United States and the OECD in general. The OECD says our poor investment performance will cost us 0.4 percentage points in per capita GDP growth every year this decade, more than in any other OECD country.

Why is our standard of living slipping compared to other industrialized economies? Demographics aside, we impose higher barriers to economic growth than our major trading partners do, especially the U.S. Innovation continues to generate great opportunities for us but if business investment remains moribund, we will miss out on many of them. Forget identity politics — growth and investment are now our top priorities.

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Trump Abolishes DEI for the Feds

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Trump, taunts and trade—Canada’s response is a decade out of date

Business / 4 hours ago

Trade retaliation might feel good—but it will hurt Canada’s economy

Business

Trump, taunts and trade—Canada’s response is a decade out of date

Published on January 21, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Ross McKitrick

Canadian federal politicians are floundering in their responses to Donald Trump’s tariff and annexation threats. Unfortunately, they’re stuck in a 2016 mindset, still thinking Trump is a temporary aberration who should be disdained and ignored by the global community. But a lot has changed. Anyone wanting to understand Trump’s current priorities should spend less time looking at trade statistics and more time understanding the details of the lawfare campaigns against him. Canadian officials who had to look up who Kash Patel is, or who don’t know why Nathan Wade’s girlfriend finds herself in legal jeopardy, will find the next four years bewildering.

Three years ago, Trump was on the ropes. His first term had been derailed by phony accusations of Russian collusion and a Ukrainian quid pro quo. After 2020, the Biden Justice Department and numerous Democrat prosecutors devised implausible legal theories to launch multiple criminal cases against him and people who worked in his administration. In summer 2022, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and leaked to the press rumours of stolen nuclear codes and theft of government secrets. After Trump announced his candidacy in 2022, he was hit by wave after wave of indictments and civil suits strategically filed in deep blue districts. His legal bills soared while his lawyers past and present battled well-funded disbarment campaigns aimed at making it impossible for him to obtain counsel. He was assessed hundreds of millions of dollars in civil penalties and faced life in prison if convicted.

This would have broken many men. But when he was mug-shotted in Georgia on Aug. 24, 2023, his scowl signalled he was not giving in. In the 11 months from that day to his fist pump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump managed to defeat and discredit the lawfare attacks, assemble and lead a highly effective campaign team, knock Joe Biden off the Democratic ticket, run a series of near daily (and sometimes twice daily) rallies, win over top business leaders in Silicon Valley, open up a commanding lead in the polls and not only survive an assassination attempt but turn it into an image of triumph. On election day, he won the popular vote and carried the White House and both Houses of Congress.

It’s Trump’s world now, and Canadians should understand two things about it. First, he feels no loyalty to domestic and multilateral institutions that have governed the world for the past half century. Most of them opposed him last time and many were actively weaponized against him. In his mind, and in the thinking of his supporters, he didn’t just defeat the Democrats, he defeated the Republican establishment, most of Washington including the intelligence agencies, the entire corporate media, the courts, woke corporations, the United Nations and its derivatives, universities and academic authorities, and any foreign governments in league with the World Economic Forum. And it isn’t paranoia; they all had some role in trying to bring him down. Gaining credibility with the new Trump team will require showing how you have also fought against at least some of these groups.

Second, Trump has earned the right to govern in his own style, including saying whatever he wants. He’s a negotiator who likes trash-talking, so get used to it and learn to decode his messages.

When Trump first threatened tariffs, he linked it to two demands: stop the fentanyl going into the United States from Canada and meet our NATO spending targets. We should have done both long ago. In response, Trudeau should have launched an immediate national action plan on military readiness, border security and crackdowns on fentanyl labs. His failure to do so invited escalation. Which, luckily, only consisted of taunts about annexation. Rather than getting whiny and defensive, the best response (in addition to dealing with the border and defence issues) would have been to troll back by saying that Canada would fight any attempt to bring our people under the jurisdiction of the corrupt U.S. Department of Justice, and we will never form a union with a country that refuses to require every state to mandate photo I.D. to vote and has so many election problems as a result.

As to Trump’s complaints about the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, this is a made-in-Washington problem. The U.S. currently imports $4 trillion in goods and services from the rest of the world but only sells $3 trillion back in exports. Trump looks at that and says we’re ripping them off. But that trillion-dollar difference shows up in the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts as the capital account balance. The rest of the world buys that much in U.S. financial instruments each year, including treasury bills that keep Washington functioning. The U.S. savings rate is not high enough to cover the federal government deficit and all the other domestic borrowing needs. So the Americans look to other countries to cover the difference. Canada’s persistent trade surplus with the U.S. ($108 billion in 2023) partly funds that need. Money that goes to buying financial instruments can’t be spent on goods and services.

So the other response to the annexation taunts should be to remind Trump that all the tariffs in the world won’t shrink the trade deficit as long as Congress needs to borrow so much money each year. Eliminate the budget deficit and the trade deficit will disappear, too. And then there will be less money in D.C. to fund lawfare and corruption. Win-win.

Ross McKitrick

Professor of Economics, University of Guelph

Business

Trade retaliation might feel good—but it will hurt Canada’s economy

Published on January 21, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Steven Globerman

To state the obvious, president-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose an across-the-board 25 per cent tariff on Canadian exports to the United States has gotten the attention of Canadian policymakers who are considering ways to retaliate.

Reportedly, if Trump makes good on his tariff threat, the federal government may levy retaliatory tariffs on a wide range of American-made goods including orange juice, ceramic products such as sinks and toilets, and some steel products. And NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he wants Canada to block exports of critical minerals such as aluminum, lithium and potash to the United States, saying that if Trump “wants to pick a fight with Canada, we have to make sure it’s clear that it’s going to hurt Americans as well.”

Indeed, the ostensible goal of tariff retaliation is to inflict economic damage on producers and workers in key U.S. jurisdictions while minimizing harm to Canadian consumers of products imported from the U.S. The hope is that there will be sufficient political blowback from Canada’s retaliation that Republican members of Congress will eventually view Trump’s tariffs as an unacceptable risk to their re-election and pressure him to roll them back.

But while Canadians might feel good about tit-for-tat retaliation against Trump’s trade bullying and taunting, it might well make things worse for the Canadian economy. For example, even selective tariffs will increase the cost of living for Canadians as importers of tariffed U.S. goods pass the tax along to domestic consumers. Retaliatory tariffs might also harm productivity growth in Canada by encouraging increased domestic production of goods that are produced relatively inefficiently here at home compared to in the U.S. Make no mistake—once trade protections are put in place, the beneficiaries have a strong vested interest in having the protections maintained indefinitely. While Trump will be gone in four years, tariffs imposed by Ottawa to retaliate against his actions will likely remain in place for longer.

The U.S. president has substantial leeway under existing legislation to implement trade measures such as tariffs. While Trump has several legislative options to impose new tariffs against Canada and Mexico, he’ll likely use the International Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA), which grants the president power to regulate imports and impose duties in response to an emergency involving any unusual and extraordinary threat to national security, foreign policy or the economy. According to Trump’s rhetoric, the emergency is illegal immigration and drug traffic originating in Canada and Mexico.

However risible Trump’s emergency claim might be when applied to Canada, overturning any action under the IEEPA, or some other enabling legislation, would require a legal challenge. And in fact, because no president has yet used the IEEPA to impose tariffs, the legality of Trump’s actions remains in doubt. In this context, a group of governors sympathetic to Canada’s position (and their own political fortunes) might spearhead a legal challenge to Trump’s tariffs with encouragement and support from the Canadian government.

To be sure, any legal challenge would take time to work its way through the U.S. court system. But it will likely also take time for domestic opposition to Trump’s tariffs to gain sufficient political momentum to effect any change. Indeed, given the current composition of Congress, it’s far from clear that a Team Canada effort to rally broad anti-tariff support among U.S. politicians and business leaders would bear fruit while Trump is in office.

While direct retaliation might be emotionally satisfying to Canadians, it would likely do more economic harm than good. And while a legal challenge will not obviate the immediate economic harm Canada will suffer from Trump’s tariffs, it might help limit the ability of Trump (and any future president) to use trade policy for political leverage in our bilateral relationship. After all, there’s no guarantee that the next president will not be a Trump acolyte.