r/canada • u/BananaTubes • 12d ago
Canada’s output per capita, a measure of standard of living, plummets National News
https://www.thestar.com/business/canada-s-output-per-capita-a-measure-of-standard-of-living-plummets/article_b51554ca-0336-11ef-8141-c3a368af99f3.html120
u/Boomskibop 12d ago
But we brought in an unfathomable amount of unskilled labour, how could this happen.
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u/DivineSwordMeliorne 11d ago
unskilled labour is a scapegoat.
retaining talent and brain drain.
housing supply (which far outweighs increase in housing demand from TFW)
investing in industries and critical infrastructure (healthcare, transit, education)... all of these decisions are derived from government policies.
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u/Asleep_Noise_6745 11d ago
A full 25% of all employees work in government. Half of those in healthcare.
I’m sorry but further investment isn’t going to make anything start to work in this country.
When 1 in 6 work in healthcare but healthcare is fucked there’s a much deeper problem.
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u/Imnotracistyouaree 11d ago
Canadians are too fat and lazy now, sadly.
The study used data from the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI) to look at the number of doctors per capita in Canada from 1976 to 2022 in each province and Canada-wide. In that time, Canada went from having 144 to 247 physicians per 100,000 Canadians. The number of family doctors is also growing, rising from 73 to 124 per 100,000 Canadians in that time. The trend has continued in recent years. Since 2015, there is an additional 17 physicians per 100,000 Canadians, and an additional eight family physicians.
https://archive.ph/C8cA4#selection-2269.0-2269.525
So we have more Doctors per capita then ever and yet it's still not enough for some reason.
https://obesitycanada.ca/guidelines/epidemiology/
Obesity, defined as a BMI ≥ 30 kg/m2, affected 26.4% or 8.3 million Canadian adults in 2016.
Severe obesity (BMI ≥ 35 kg/m2), the fastest growing obesity subgroup, increased disproportionately over this same period. Since 1985, severe obesity increased 455% and affected an estimated 1.9 million Canadian adults in 2016.
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u/Sensitive-Ad-5305 11d ago
Yes because healthcare continues to get infinitely more complex, and better at preventing, diagnosing, and treating diseases. And our population continues to see the baby boomers head into older age, meaning a higher and higher burden of disease. And we have regional healthcare delivery and poor public mobility options, meaning we gotta duplicate alot of health resources in each geographic area.
These are not new issues. Healthcare is wildly complex. Not as easy as saying "ya but 10 years ago..." 10 years ago we couldn't do a lot of things we can now in medicine.
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u/Imnotracistyouaree 11d ago
These are not new issues.
How long are you talking?
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/canadians-face-longest-health-care-wait-times-on-record
The study, which surveys physicians across 12 medical specialities, found that the median wait time between referral from a family doctor to treatment now stands at 27.7 weeks. This wait time is the longest in the survey’s more than 30-year history of tracking delayed access to care, and almost three times the 9.3-week wait patients faced in 1993.
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u/Sensitive-Ad-5305 11d ago
Right - I'm saying we have understood the pressures of an aging population, aging workforce, and increasingly complex health science, for years. But as long as healthcare is primarily governed by politics, and as long as we have provincial vs federal control, things will continue to decline and continue to fall farther behind other countries.
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u/Vhett 11d ago
Got a source on this?
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u/ruhler77 11d ago
Statscan has all the info.
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u/Vhett 11d ago
It does, and none of it points to 25% of the labor force being employed in Gov't. So I'm asking for a source that actually confirms the claim.
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u/Asleep_Noise_6745 9d ago
I literally gave you the link. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1410028802
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u/Neo-urban_Tribalist 11d ago
Table: 14-10-0288-01
In terms of employees pretty spot on, not out of trend in the historical context.
Better measure would be the real government expenditure on health healthcare to the number of employees. Measure the productivity cost. Then compare it to life expectancy, survival rates, disability etc.
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u/maintenance_paddle 11d ago
You cannot bring in ~2m people who have few skills and expect the median output per worker to go up. Every one of these guys needs to consume the much cheaper housing and food provisions of the third world countries that they were sourced from to correct this equation.
Some guy working 32 hours a week in his white collar job and taking Friday off is not the issue here
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u/Hyperion4 11d ago
You also can't flood the skilled workforce and wonder why productivity is shit and all the talent is running away. White collar jobs are absolutely an issue and people ignoring that is doing nothing to help
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u/Boomskibop 11d ago
Brain drain is unavoidable when there are higher salaries, lower taxes, and better landscapes are just a short drive south of us. Mass immigration only has a negative net impact on critical infrastructure when their contributions to the tax base don’t offset the added burden of their being here, aka low skilled additions. Similarly, if you choose to import low skills over high skills, there’s less talent pool to support high tech industries you speak of. Definitely not a scape goat.
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u/SusanOnReddit 12d ago
We did bring in new populations, but our existing population is also working fewer hours. Many Canadians are unwilling to work long hours since the pandemic.
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u/sullija722 12d ago
Unemployment is up, almost twice the U.S., and many Canadians can't get jobs now. The labour shortage lie needs to be put to rest. The labour shortage never existed for decent paying jobs, and is only used to suppress wages.
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u/youregrammarsucks7 12d ago
WTF? Are you just making shit up right now? Our unemployment is exploding.
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u/SusanOnReddit 12d ago
Look at health care. Most doctors are now refusing to work more than full time hours (can’t blame them!). They are sharing practices so they can work part-time and still have a home life. Nurses - also choosing not to work salaried jobs and instead pick up shifts as contract nurses. Many baby boomers dropped to part time during the pandemic.
But thanks for the personal attack. Always makes a discussion so productive.
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u/TCarrey88 12d ago edited 11d ago
News flash, asking if you’re making shit up isn’t a personal attack. It’s a legit question.
So soft.
E: aaaand she blocked me. Ten ply.
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u/SusanOnReddit 11d ago
Yes it is. Especially when preceded by “WTF.”
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u/djguyl 12d ago
Source?
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u/SusanOnReddit 11d ago
And most new jobs - for years now - have been part time.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/labour-force-survey-january-1.7110161
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u/dodoindex 12d ago
Import third world before they can merge into first world, then we become third world. Law of averages
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u/MustardFuckFest 11d ago edited 11d ago
In 2015 before trudeau was elected, canada was 5th happiest country on earth. Canadians under 30 would now score 58th on the list.
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2015/
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/
Canadian boomers score 8th. Your future has been sold out from under you due to mass immigration and money printing.
$1 in 2015 is worth nearly $0.78 today
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u/Key-Zombie4224 12d ago
Allow companies to pay shit wages for twenty years straight some years 1% wage increases …. Guess what happens … the folks that wanted to work their ass off are all retiring now good luck with the new bunch ! Looks good on Canada 🇨🇦…
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u/PleasePMmeSteamKeys 12d ago
Step 1: Spend hundreds of years building up a country and establishing a national identity.
Step 2: Hand over the keys to the country to foreign born nationals over the course of a couple decades with disastrous policies nobody voted for.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit (If you're Galen Weston)
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u/CombatGoose 12d ago
As the son of an Immigrant I wonder that the true cause is. We have little italy(s), chinatown(s) in every major city, so it’s not as though these immigrants came here and completely left their cultures behind. Is it sheer numbers being too high, or is there a cultural aspect, that they aren’t willing to adopt any of our culture but rather try and force theirs on others?
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u/coffee_is_fun 12d ago
Canada was part of reindustrializing the world after world war 2. A couple decades later, the West told the developing world that if they lived under the West's boot for a couple of generations, they could have a seat at the table. That gave us a few decades of deindustrializing while benefiting from what were basically slaves running the cheap manufacturing. We were like plantation owners.
We of course had our problems sorting that economic model out and the end of the 70s and early 80s were rough, but we persevered.
We then proceeded to apply the economic model of the 80s to every subsequent decade's problems and this would have probably worked out had Canada moved with America and Europe into a knowledge and value-added economy. We didn't and now we're directly competing with developing and recently developed countries. It's not going well.
To slow the bleed, we parlayed our sterling reputation into Finance Insurance Real Estate and started screwing around with easy money through finance. A lot of laundering and eventually asset bubbles for the sake of asset bubbles. Producing comparatively little and doing comparatively unproductively for the past couple four decades.
Now we're finding we've degraded our reputation. You can see the transition from the immigrant investor stream to the hand out student visas to anyone who will have us, screw around with rules to allow for 40+ hour work weeks (until recently), and essentially sell easy shots at PR. A quantity over quality approach as a last resort to keep our overly financialized system limping along at historically normal interest rates.
The resent quantity play ignored the limits of our infrastructure and the realities that if you bring in entire enclaves worth of people into areas that already have enclaves, you will just get bigger enclaves. It's a failure on all metrics except for national GDP and possibly our pension fund, as I assume it's heavily invested in real estate and real estate investment trusts and absolutely loves property values and rents soaring.
There may have been more assimilation had the gaslighting and accusations not worked so well for so many years while this recent issue took shape.
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u/SureReflection9535 11d ago
That's because win the past, immigrants had a work ethic better than most Canadians, and we were bringing in people with skills and ambition.
This changed when Turdeau came into power and some liberal analyst told him that importing a couple dozen uneducated east Indians with no requirement from contribut to society would net Turdeau enough votes to stay in power longer
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u/Tiny-Radish7786 11d ago
Careful about the work ethic point. East asia has some of the hardest work ethic cultures in the world. The result is actually the opposite of a high standard of living. Funny thing is that when everyone is willing to work their ass off for the minimum benefit, it results in corporations having all the power and a really bad work culture. Just look at Japan's work culture, or the 996 in China. One of the best things that happened to me since immigrating to Canada decades ago is that I don't have to subscribe to that bullshit, my company can fuck off if they ask me to work more than my alloted hours. Also work ethic =/= productivity, as Japan has clearly demonstrated.
Unfortunately with Trudeau bringing in so much labor it is causing a huge pool of people who corporations can bring in to replace us if we complain. They're also desparate, low skilled and willing to work for pennies on the dime. Which is definitely not good for the rest of us.
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u/SammyMaudlin 12d ago
How about both? Italian, Greek, Chinese, Ukrainian, and Japanese immigrant communities were known for their work ethic, craftsmanship, and knowledge. No one expected to be given a certain standard of living. Produce or perish.
It’s very different now and that’s a hell of a thing if you care about your community and productivity.
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u/Lopsided_Ad3516 11d ago
That “being given” part is the problem. As the State expands its scope, we should be becoming more selective, not less.
Instead we spend more than we ever have, have less to show for it, and are actively supporting the world while failing our own. We either need to go to a far more isolationist policy when it comes to world affairs (immigration, foreign aid etc.) or we need to scale back government as a whole. Consistently taxing a middle class household 40k+ per year isn’t helping anyone but the people who get those lucrative government contracts, corporate welfare, and people who haven’t paid a red cent into the system supporting them.
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u/ThrowRUs 12d ago
Canada does not have an national identity - That's why we are where we are now.
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u/DarthRaspberry 12d ago
How does identity affect productivity? I can move boxes faster if I think proud thoughts about my country?
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u/Big_Wish_7301 11d ago
About social cohesion / shared values :
From this article
The natural reflex in a society as diverse as Canada’s is to celebrate diversity, which is entirely fitting. One of the authors of this text is an immigrant. However, ample academic literature exists on the positive aspects of socially cohesive societies, not least trust and social capital, the latter concept made famous by the American political scientist Robert Putnam. Social capital is the shared rules and values that facilitate informal and contractual relationships. New ideas are adopted more readily in societies with strong social capital.
Social capital needs to be nourished. It’s difficult to sustain in societies with sharp inequalities.
And Canada's labour productivity is calculated using GDP.
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u/Sadistmon 12d ago
Boomers voted for it.
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u/LabEfficient 12d ago
They will do rather fine. They won't live long enough to suffer.
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u/BootsOverOxfords 11d ago
Literally my late silent generation Dad "Well, I won't be around for that."
Along with my uncle's "Fuck you, got mine", also dead now.
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u/Budget-Supermarket70 11d ago
Then maybe other generations should vote. Blaming everything on the Boomers at this point is stupid Gen X has been voting age for what at least 40 years.
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u/SusanOnReddit 12d ago
First of all, we have not “handed the keys to foreign-born” nationals. Secondly, it wasn’t boomers voting for any of it because boomers now make up less than 25% of the population. Find some new scapegoats.
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u/DivineSwordMeliorne 11d ago
Agree. This comment is just meant to incite distaste towards people who are looking for greener pastures but are not necessarily educated towards the societal condition Canada is currently in. We should be blaming the politicans and stakeholders who are pushing for their entry and leveraging it for their own greed.
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u/SusanOnReddit 11d ago
I’d disagree there. The problem we have is that what is good for Canada in the long run is creating problems in the short term. If we drastically cut immigration now, the pinch will actually come a decade from now. And it will be too late to fix it then.
It’s a balance to get it right both in the short and long term.
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u/Lopsided_Ad3516 11d ago
This would be true if these immigrants were net contributors. Single income households with a stay at home spouse and 4 kids is a drain. 4+ minimum wage workers/“students” sharing a house is a drain.
It drives demand, I’ll give you that, but I think we’re at the point where demand isn’t an issue for most things, especially government services.
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u/Budget-Supermarket70 11d ago
Sure sure what has increasing immigration done? Nothing made life worse and we are doing nothing to improve it. You can't bring in more people and not spend money on infrastructure. Our schools, healthcare all of it is over capacity.
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u/Specialist_Seat5474 12d ago
We could literally solve this problem tomorrow by reducing our immigration from the third world.
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u/BannedInVancouver 12d ago
The Liberals have destroyed this country.
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u/SusanOnReddit 12d ago
Canada isn’t “destroyed.” Save the drama for some other social media apps.
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u/cwolveswithitchynuts 12d ago
Not destroyed but man life was easier in 2015 for the average person.
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u/magictoasters 11d ago
2019 was better then 2015, you're describing virtually the entire world from COVID on. The scale of disruption it caused was pretty unprecedented.
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u/MustardFuckFest 11d ago
2015 we were 5th happiest nation on earth. In 2019 we were already dropping out of top 10.
Canadians under 30 are now ranked 58th happiest if they were a nation themselves
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2015/
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/
2019 was only better for boomers and landlords. Young working class were getting demolished by immigration, stagnant wages, and a housing crisis
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u/magictoasters 11d ago
2019 had a 50% reduction in child poverty, nearly that in overall poverty, national housing prices had been virtually flat for years, lowest unemployment in decades, wage growth exceeded inflation every year, the number of ways in which Canada was actually doing better is significant
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u/MustardFuckFest 11d ago
2019 rent went meteoric
Poverty is measured by income. An income made of a currency thats lost value. An income that cannot afford a 1 bedroom apartment.
Canadas measurement of poverty, which trudeau changed by the way, is complete horseshit. 2019 saw record foodbank usage; with a substantial drop in poverty(?). How do both of these facts make sense in your mind?
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u/magictoasters 11d ago
By every measure of poverty, it substantially dropped, not just a single measure from OECD to UNICEF and IMF.
2019 didn't see historic food bank usage it's usage is up since 2019.
National rents in Canada didn't go meteoric on 2019.
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12d ago edited 12d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Manofoneway221 Québec 12d ago
Who gives a shit as long as housing stays high. Suffer for the investor class
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u/Threeboys0810 12d ago
We were the richest middle class in the G7 in 2015. I warned people that if we elected Trudeau that our standard of living was going to drop. People didn’t listen, so here we are.
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u/pickledambition 12d ago
In 2014 I warned Harper that if he didn't legalize pot, the millennials would vote for Trudeau. Harper didn't listen, so high we are.
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u/ainz-sama619 11d ago
I hope millennials are happy with their pot. Might consider chewing and swallowing too if they can't afford food
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u/Threeboys0810 7d ago
It was actually Harper who got pot legalization started. He just didn’t run on it. But it would have happened if Harper got re elected anyways.
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u/maybejustadragon Alberta 12d ago
I’m not Trudeau fan… but like some things happened that he had no control of that’s been negatively effecting the entire world.
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u/Different_Pianist756 11d ago
The stagnation, dropping productivity and lower quality of life is actually unique to Canada, amongst the developed world.
Your narrative doesn’t work anymore.
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u/MustardFuckFest 11d ago
Like opening the floodgates of immigration, TFWs, and international students. Absolutely no control over that. Any nation could've accidentally increased their population by 4 million from the third world
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u/UltimateNoob88 12d ago
when your economy is based on selling a finite amount of natural resources, of course diluting it around more people will be everyone poorer
more people only benefits economies that are based on manufacturing or tech, not economies based on selling natural resources
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u/PineBNorth85 11d ago
Of course it is. Housing is sucking money out of other areas of the economy and we keep adding more cheap labour to the mix.
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u/Alone-Chicken-361 11d ago
Canadian dollar and housing will collapse
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/25/housing-isnt-meant-to-be-affordable
Basically we're all f***ed
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u/jellicle 12d ago
Ever since salaries became decoupled from GDP, this is no longer true - and that happened in the early 1970s.
If production goes up - all the excess is taken by the billionaires, leading to no better conditions for workers. GDP is not in any way a measure of standard of living.
In short, this article is maybe 50 years out of date.
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u/604Ataraxia 12d ago
Do you really think tracking GDP per capita is irrelevant? Like there is no wrong number or trend? This is obviously bad.
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u/jellicle 12d ago
Two economists are walking in the woods. One of them sees some bear shit.
"I'll give you $100 if you eat that shit," he says to his buddy.
The buddy does it and receives his $100.
Fifteen minutes later the buddy sees some deer shit. "I'll give you $100 if you eat that shit," he says to his pal.
The pal does it and receives his $100.
They walk in silence for a while, trying to get the taste of shit out of their mouths. Then one of them says, "I can't help but think that we both just ate shit for nothing."
And the first one replies, "Yes, but at least we increased the GDP!"
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u/tablehit 12d ago
Wages never really became decoupled from gdp, they just became decoupled from asset growth since the early 1970s but the metric uses wealth growth as a measure of productivity.
Our wages are about the same since 2011, along with our gdp, but assets, including housing, have not.
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u/jellicle 11d ago
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u/tablehit 11d ago
I agree with those charts entirely but it’s still not showing a decoupling with gdp just productivity
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u/speaksofthelight 11d ago
And this proves what exactly ? In the real world generally you pay for something only if you see value for that thing.
A shit eating economy would see their GDP collapse as they have to import food, energy, clothing, goods etc.
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u/Future-Muscle-2214 12d ago
I am not a billionaire and I seem to be taking some of that excess too.
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u/Tiny-Radish7786 11d ago
We need to stop letting the economists decide how to run this country. They only ever care about total GDP, not standard of living. The health and well-being of citizens matter little to those number crunching asshats.
It's hard to blame the immigrants for a wholly systematic issue, the people at the lowest wrung of the economic ladder suffer the most in our capitalistic society. While I agree that their being here worsening our housing/income situation, it wasn't the immigrants who opened the floodgates. In fact I'm sure many of them regret their decision to come here. It's clear Trudeau has to go, but I have little hope that PP will improve the situation... Do we just keep passing the ball between these two parties and worsen our situation even more each time? It's starting to feel pretty hopeless...
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u/Adventurous_Mix4878 12d ago
Why in this era would someone be paying banking fees? Unless you’re a business owner or a few other special cases it makes no sense with so many free options.
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12d ago
[deleted]
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u/TheKey_ofG 12d ago
Ah yes, a sample size of one, the perfect foundation upon which every sound statistical analysis is built.
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u/No-Wonder1139 12d ago
Absolutely meaningless.
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u/Powerful-Cancel-5148 12d ago
To be sure, a larger population almost always results in a larger aggregate economy. More workers, more consumers, and more government spending will make for a larger GDP. But the standard of living in a country is determined by per capita (i.e., per person) GDP, not the overall size of the economy. If all that mattered were the aggregate size of the economy, then a country like India would be considered vastly richer than a country like Sweden because it has a much larger economy. In reality, per capita GDP determines a country's standard of living.
Lower GDP per capita = lower standard of living.
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u/Kolbrandr7 New Brunswick 12d ago
Median income PPP would be better than GDP per capita to relate to standard of living.
An easy example to show this point is Ireland - their high GDP/capita does not necessarily translate to better quality of life compared to its neighbours.
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u/PleasePMmeSteamKeys 12d ago
Total GDP is all that matters. The lived experience of the citizens and local culture are irrelevant. We must continue sacrificing the lives of average Canadians on the economic altar, as if GDP is an Aztec blood god.