How Not to Build a Country: Canada’s Late Soviet Pessimism(2019) (opens in new tab)

As an electrical engineer in the vancouver area this article rung true to me. It is too bad Canada's hi tech industry died with nortel, RIM, corel. Bombardier's aerospace division is the latest casualty. I didn't realize the cancellation of the avro arrow was the beginning of the end for tech in Canada. What do we do other than resources and real estate?

Qualify of life is pretty high there, right? Are there many poor people? Do median people have access to good education and healthcare?

They don't produce new billionaires via cutthroat competition, so?

Please let me live in that sort of "late soviet pessimism", safety, stability, work, leisure. Oh the horrors.

Resource extraction industries in Canada will always take a bulk of the engineering talent, that is where the money is. Venture capital for mining is well established in Canada. As for real estate, everyone uses floating mortgages, so prices will stay high until interest rates go up. Salaries in Canada are structured differently. Because taxes on income over $80,000 a year are very high, deferred compensation such as pensions and real estate gains are more important. Barter or cash jobs are another important source of income. Americans would never tolerate the rationing that Canadians go through for health care.

I didn't find this particularly convincing. The examples seem to be that government intervention in (consumer) healthcare and agriculture causes stagnation, with the implication that this extends to other industries.

But healthcare & agriculture are unique industries that are regulated very differently than other industries in canada. I don't expect these industries to be cut throat. I'd rather have stability in those sectors and leave the innovation to other sectors. Regardless of your view on that point though, i fail to see how the example generalizes.

I don't understand the Brezhnev analogies (first I've seen that metaphor applied to Canada), but this matches my experience:

"Many startups and tech companies I know are having a hard time hiring developers, especially with Amazon moving in. Their salaries are way too low. On a few occasions, I’ve gotten to ask if they’d consider raising compensation, but I get the same reply every time: “This is how much a developer should make. We’re not paying a penny more.”

Luckily, Canada will be one of the biggest winners of global warming. Most of their land mass is not arable today, but it will be tomorrow.