Canada is a country with substantial tailwinds, but also substantial headwinds.

The current prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, had an ad with famous actor and comedian Mike Myers in this years election campaign. The two have something in common: neither of them have spent much time in Canada in the past 10 years. Myers moved to the US once he got some success, and Carney was a Goldman Sachs investment banker at the start of his career in the US, spent some time in Canada, and then moved to Europe. This speaks to the reality that Canada has a big problem with brain drain. Once people get to a certain level of success, they tend to leave.

Part of the cause of the recent trouble was actually Canada's immense success. In the 2000s, the federal government under the liberals managed to balance the budget and paid down a considerable percentage of the federal debt, crime was relatively low, Canada hit most lists for one of the best places in the world to live, and opportunities particularly in the oil sands meant that normal people could go out into the world and do very well for themselves. In a situation like that, a lot of people are going to feel some level of guilt knowing that there are still other people who are suffering. This is how successful countries end up with a leader like Trudeau in charge.

The housing problem by itself has also been something of a double ended sword. Housing makes up an overwhelming amount of Canada's economy these days, because it's something very easy for the government to prop up. Make it harder to build and easier to buy, and prices go up. Import people from around the world, and prices go up. Let people raid their retirement savings for a down payment, and prices go up. Meanwhile, the government can collect taxes on the million dollar homes and all the businesses that end up surrounding those homes. Prices nation-wide peaked around 850k for a single family home. This ends up being a boon to the government and to a few boomers who bought 50k homes in the 90s, but it's bad for the economy when you need to come up with 1500/mo to live in a basic apartment in a second or third tier city.

Those high housing prices aren't the only high costs. Canada has a huge and overbearing state, and a jealous one too. The United States generally has free trade between states, but Canada does not have the same between provinces. You can have a product manufactured in Manitoba that cannot be sold in Ontario or Saskatchewan. Moreover, for products such as crude oil which Canada has an abundance, it is proven essentially impossible to build pipelines to get those resources to appropriate markets within Canada, so Canada ships those resources to the United states, the United States builds pipelines and the like, and then we buy it back from The Americans. The Canadian Federal government, after implementing sweeping new legislation to make it more difficult to build things like pipelines ended up purchasing one of the major pipeline projects. I believe that they did so in order to show Private industry how easy it was to complete a pipeline. In reality, it prove that even with the full power of the federal government behind it, they barely got the project done. Ontario's greenstone field contains generational levels of wealth, but it has been stuck in the ground for decades because the various levels of government can't agree on how to let Private industry make use of those resources.

Canada was once a major center of tech. At the beginning of the computer era, it spawned companies such as ATI and Adlib, and later on companies such as Nortel and blackberry. Today, the Canadian government has passed numerous laws to explicitly censor the internet and implement corporate socialism whereupon in return for being allowed to operate in canada, successful American companies pay a tithe to unsuccessful Canadian companies of course selected by the Canadian government.

To make up for the fact that GDP cannot be produced with innovation or productive industry, the Canadian government makes up for it by importing an overwhelming number of people. The Canadian population was roughly stable at about 40 million people, in order to increase GDP the government embarked on an unheard of amount of immigration, over a million people every year. This did result in higher gdp, but it also resulted in lower per capita GDP and it was self-evidently a direct causal element in rising cost of living.

All of this doesn't look that bad for the state, but in spite of massive increases in the number of people employed by the state in the last 10 years, most people don't work for the state. As a result, investment in the country takes a downward spiral where companies in Canada have a much harder time attracting investment compared to comparable companies in the US or Europe. This means that there are fewer opportunities overall, which means fewer opportunities for tax income, which means the government tightens its grip further, which means fewer attractive investment opportunities, and so on and so forth. Entire regions of the country have been hollowed out.

Which brings us back to the university and college education. What we are seeing with the extremely high levels of education in Canada is not a virtuous country that values education. What we are seeing with the extremely high levels of education is a feedback loop where people require overwhelming amounts of money just to survive, and so people make major time and money investments into education in the hope that it will give them the opportunity to join one of those high paid professions that will let them get the million dollar mortgage for their forever home. Meanwhile, pure economics says that the more you have of a thing the less valuable it is, and so in spite of having all these educated people, they're just aren't enough elite jobs to go around.

And so that is why Canada is so highly educated and yet is doing so poorly.

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