Poor Canada; forever ignored and when it’s not ignored forever patronised. Except when the Quebeckers become fractious, Canadian politics and life barely merits a mention in either the British or American press. We even tend to overlook the Canucks when the stories of the Great Wars of the twentieth century are told. How soon Vimy Ridge slips from consciousness. But Canada has plenty going for it (even if most of the Canadians I know don’t actually live in Canada). So, three cheers for Fareed Zakaria’s latest Newsweek column:
Guess which country, alone in the industrialized world, has not faced a single bank failure, calls for bailouts or government intervention in the financial or mortgage sectors. Yup, it’s Canada. In 2008, the World Economic Forum ranked Canada’s banking system the healthiest in the world. America’s ranked 40th, Britain’s 44th…
Canada has also been shielded from the worst aspects of this crisis because its housing prices have not fluctuated as wildly as those in the United States. Home prices are down 25 percent in the United States, but only half as much in Canada. Why? Well, the Canadian tax code does not provide the massive incentive for overconsumption that the U.S. code does: interest on your mortgage isn’t deductible up north… Ah, but you’ve heard American politicians wax eloquent on the need for these expensive programs—interest deductibility alone costs the federal government $100 billion a year—because they allow the average Joe to fulfill the American Dream of owning a home. Sixty-eight percent of Americans own their own homes. And the rate of Canadian homeownership? It’s 68.4 percent.
Canada has been remarkably responsible over the past decade or so. It has had 12 years of budget surpluses, and can now spend money to fuel a recovery from a strong position. The government has restructured the national pension system, placing it on a firm fiscal footing, unlike our own insolvent Social Security. Its health-care system is cheaper than America’s by far (accounting for 9.7 percent of GDP, versus 15.2 percent here), and yet does better on all major indexes. Life expectancy in Canada is 81 years, versus 78 in the United States; “healthy life expectancy” is 72 years, versus 69. American car companies have moved so many jobs to Canada to take advantage of lower health-care costs that since 2004, Ontario and not Michigan has been North America’s largest car-producing region.
So, yes, let’s hear it for Canada. For once. (Actually, given the number of Britons moving to the old dominions, we should class Canada as a great success story just as we do Australia.)
[Thanks to Will Wilkinson for the FZ heads-up.]
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