Canada in (boring) pictures
(and text offered in mature Camel Case sentences)
As much as I love Americana, Canada is home at least legally for me. I noticed that the Great White North had a particularly unflattering welcome to the Spring of 2026. Here is it in 6 bullets:
Canada’s GDP per capita has been trending TERRIBLE among OECD countries for the past decade, per a Bank of Canada study. In fact it ranks lower than Alabama’s which is not a surprise if you follow this type of metric, but shocked many Canadians that usually condescend the meth lab downstairs that is America (more on the condescending part later)
The same Bank of Canada study has numbers for what we always knew: brain drain.
40% of the top 1% earners in Canada leave for the US. About 50% of the next 9 percentile earners also move to the US.
Brain drain towards where the opportunity is shouldn’t be surprising. Canadian artists, entrepreneurs, and high-skilled workers have always moved to the Hollywood, Silicon Valley, or NYC. Or just across the border in Michigan or New York for better paying jobs. But this is the first time I am seeing some numbers attached to it.Canada had the steepest decline in World Happiness Ranking. I don’t really give much value to these subjective rankings. But the steep drop was surprising.
Canadian Prime Minister tweets the customary message of being a “proud bilingual” nation, and 3 days later an Air Canada flight crashes into a fire truck at La Guardia Airport in New York, which exposed the fundamental crack in Canadian sovereignty: ironically, bilingualism.
Canada is raining money! Not in a good way. The government is printing money like there’s no tomorrow to meet spending that they are unable to meet using taxes. Excess money supply affects the bottom 80% of people by decreasing the value of their money so they spend more for everything from milk to clothes to cars. Relative to the US, housing is absurdly expensive and skilled labour is very cheap in Canada. Given that, how does it go when the government devalues the dollar the average Canadian earns?
Why does Canada have to print money? Canada never had to spend much on defence unlike a lot of other countries. Well, some of the taxes are spend on things many taxpayers wouldn’t approve of. Look at this 25 million dollar item:
enhance the adoption of gender-responsive and inclusive nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation in the Guinean forests of West Africa
What if this was spent on.. reducing the 18-month wait time for an x-ray or a scan? Or spent on hiring an additional doctor where the wait time for a doctor is 3-4 years?
An immigration audit from Carney administration found out what the previous Trudeau administration already knew. Unbelievable amounts of fraud which had led Trudeau administration to scale down immigration but the numbers weren’t known. Of the 400,000 applications approved and audited now, more than 150,000 were in violation. It also found that more than 35,000 people with expired visas are still in the country1.
The Great White North
Is Canada flailing? Canada seemed like the Europe in North America. Everything that was wrong with America, Canada had it right. Right? I had that delusion too.
Then I moved to Canada.
Problem# 1.
What Canada gains in natural resources, it loses in geographic disadvantage
Canada is abundant in minerals and natural resources. It has the largest fresh water reserves. It has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. It has the second largest land area administered by a liberal democracy that values property rights, civil rights, and justice.
But Canada was never as productive as its Southern neighbor because of a geographic disadvantage. And that’s not the weather. It’s a geographic feature called the Canadian Shield. A geological rock formation underneath the eastern half of Canada that makes the soil non-arable. Every part of the land that is arable has already been settled for agriculture, but most of the land is just economically non-productive vegetation.
Secondly, Canada is blessed with lakes, but unlike the US not with rivers. And that is a problem. Agricultural productivity in the US surpassed every other country 150 years ago because the Mississippi River and its tributaries (see pic below) made transport of harvest easier, cheaper, and profitable for farmers to go sell in other markets in the US. Success begets success. High agricultural productivity led to more industrial innovation, which led to easy financing (more banks), which led to further expansion of logistics beyond rivers (railroad and interstate highways), making the US the super power it has been since the world wars.
To this day, Canada has to fly out groceries and mail to it’s northern territories because they are not accessible by water or land, making basic amenities so expensive that the government subsidizes it for them. Try a road trip from Eastern Canada to Atlantic Canada (left to right directionally on the map). Or from Eastern Canada to Western Canada (in the opposite direction). You’ll notice that Google Maps will force you to go through the US in both cases, and that’s your best bet. Canada doesn’t have much of a highway system.
Now why did I ask to try the road trip from “Eastern Canada”? Because more than half of Canadians live in this red nook between Michigan and Vermont, called Eastern Canada. Canada is otherwise just empty land, with civilization sprinkled along the border of the US.
This high population density and vast geographic spread is why housing is so expensive in Canada. The geographic and economic disadvantage bleeds into other areas. Take healthcare.
Canadian single payer system is the healthcare utopia for a lot of Americans who haven’t been a customer. You have to live there to understand that it is only helpful when you have a terminal illness or close-fatal accident - so it almost works like insurance. It’s great for a really unfavorable one-time healthcare event. For the reasons you want healthcare 300 times in your life time - fever, infection, broken bones, unknown illness, anxiety, depression - it is a terrible system.
Simply because you don’t have access to services, facilities, or professionals when you need it!
Look at pay as an example. Market-based pay will continue to drive professionals away from state-controlled healthcare (remember the earlier Bank of Canada study of the top earners fleeing Canada). Average physician in the US makes $458,000. In Canada they make $194,000. Where do you think your average physician want to work? My pay precisely halved when I moved from the US to Canada, while housing prices doubled (or quadrupled based on location).
Most Canadians have private healthcare (yes, in addition to taxes paid to single payer system) or they will never get care. Any Canadian who had to go a US hospital for a serious treatment or childbirth is in awe of the quality of healthcare in the US. However, if a brilliant Canadian high school teacher finds out he has lung cancer, he will just go to the hospital instead of.. Breaking Bad.
Problem# 2.
What Canada gains in melting pot cultural heritage, it loses in lack of national identity
Peter Zeihan called it years ago. Canada’s fundamental problem is the French-English divide. French Canadians think believe (and is taught in school) that the land was unfairly taken from them by British. Air Canada’s CEO is under fire, not for any systemic issues that took the life of two pilots at La Gaurdia, but for delivering the condolence in English. Yeah, that 100 year war between French and English kingdoms never really ended.
Quebec’s language police (yes, that’s a real thing) poses a real menace to businesses and English-speaking individuals. If you drive across Canada, you’ll see every road sign, including temporary construction signs, set up in English and in French. Not in Quebec where everything is in French. But Quebecois demand bilingualism elsewhere in Canada.
A citizen of Alberta who doesn’t speak French can’t get a local government job in English-speaking Alberta unless they spoke French. Bilingualism is a requirement for employment. But Alberta’s equalization payments from oil money is what finances Quebec’s European style welfare and language totalitarianism. Unsurprisingly Alberta wants to secede from Canada.
The French has every right to want to sustain their culture. Western democracy, civic, and legal systems are the outcome of French revolution. Philosophy and math is heavily influenced by French intellectuals. However the language is dying. The French won’t let go but the only way to resurrect the language might be creating French babies filles du roi style.
Every province on earth with a French-speaking faction is dwindling. European schools don’t learn French as much as the French want them to as seen in this map.
English has become the inevitable lingua franca for a globalized world, and that’s not imposed by Britain or other Anglo Saxon countries. Some call it soft power, and the French have lost it if they ever had it.
Speaking of dying languages, I (kinda) speak the oldest language on earth that’s still spoken. It’s called Tamil, a Dravidian language spoken in India and some South Asian countries. The literary elites of Tamil have a vestigial passion for their language so they have an ideological disapproval for Hindi being the national language of India. Since Aryans or Dravidians in India were not a civilization of conquest unlike the French or the British or the Spanish, there are no complaints of Tamil not being the lingua franca. Nor are they demanding Indians learn Tamil. But Frenchmen are entertainingly pugnacious.
Outside of the language dichotomy, the only other defining identity of Canada is pouting about being good-er than the United States. Many Canadians are hooked to the US new channels. Canadian news doesn’t offer enough drama beyond the animosity of French Language police or some celebration of cultural melting pot. But the US news is quite the movie script.
I once told a lady in my Montreal office that Chicago was colder (it was, at least during that winter). She got so annoyed and may have stopped talking to me since. Canada has to be something-er than the US. Being better, colder, warmer, or nicer than the US cannot be a national identity. You have to believe in something about yourself.
Canada has extremely high auto insurance premiums. Anecdotally, certain zip codes have auto insurance rates even higher (eg. Scarborough in Toronto) because immigrants from third world countries like India are the majority here and they drive like it’s India. So insuring automobiles are a high-risk business in these zip codes.
An example is how the STOP signs aren’t available in India, so when many Indian drivers see a STOP sign, they think that they need to stop only if there’s a vehicle around. They passed the driver’s test in Canada, so it’s not an educational issue. It’s a cultural issue. They drive through the STOP sign as fast and as safe as they can without stopping, and certainly this results in a crash a lot of times.
We drive in Canada or in the US with the expectation that others obey the rules we obey, like how you stop at a STOP sign although there’s no electronic red light. It’s a high-trust society. On the other hand, we drive in India with the expectation that nobody obeys the rule and if you do, you’ll be the one losing time and opportunity. It’s a low-trust society.
When someone flashes their headlight in the US or Canada, it means “go ahead, I will wait for you”. In India it means, “move out of my way, I won’t slow down”. If you can, you should drive in India once before you die. It’s the greatest adventure man has ever invented if you can come out of it alive.
Regardless, this cultural dichotomy and the lack of assimilation will be acutely felt with the type of mass immigration Canada has undertaken.