Canada: Beating the U.S. at its own game

The U.S. may be the world’s only military superpower, said Stephen Marche in Bloomberg.com, but even on their own continent Americans are no longer the wealthiest. A new study—released on Canada Day, no less—found that “for the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American,” with a household net worth of $363,202, compared with $319,970 in the U.S. For American conservatives, the most galling factor in Canada’s rise has to be that “hardheaded socialism” played the decisive role. Tight banking regulations, in particular, helped insulate Canada from the worst of the financial crisis and allowed us to preserve the “sacred trust” of our publicly funded health-care and education systems. The record numbers of Americans heading north in search of work and better lives are proof enough: “The Canadian system is working; the American system is not.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Investor’s Business Daily in an editorial. Canada was an overtly socialist nation for many years, and economically stagnant as a result. But that changed in the 1990s, when then Finance Minister Paul Martin started a virtuous habit of “fiscal discipline” that subsequent governments have maintained. Canada today has a federal deficit that stands at 2 percent of GDP, as opposed to the U.S.’s 10 percent; its total federal debt amounts to around 35 percent of GDP, as opposed to 100 percent in the U.S. And Canada is more committed than ever to free-market capitalism, said Terence Corcoran in NationalPost.com. President Obama, meanwhile, has been taking the U.S. in a “demonstrably leftist and anti-capitalist direction,” with predictably grim results for his nation’s economy.

The surprise here isn’t that Canada is outdoing the U.S. economically, said Reihan Salam in NationalReview.com. Considering that it attracts “large numbers of college-educated immigrants,” that it has a higher percentage of two-parent families, and that its real estate market hasn’t cratered, the “really interesting question” is why Canada’s wealth advantage isn’t even greater. We’re just happy to be in front, said Douglas Haddow in Guardian.co.uk. Through the years, we’ve repeatedly beaten the U.S. at hockey, but “never at anything it truly cares about.” Edging ahead in terms of wealth means we’ve bested the U.S. on its own turf—and that feels pretty good. Not that we’d ever gloat, of course. To do that would be “ultimately un-Canadian.”

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