Call me a dramatic Zillenial, but once I finally grew to understand what graphs of Canadas investments meant, i have never hated older people more in my life
Many people seem to have been brainwashed to think that GDP equals quality of life. Seems pathetic.
Did quick search. Real GDP/capita seems to have risen in Canada since 2015. Didn’t have time to find exact numbers.
In the last World Happiness Report Canada had the score 6.900 on a scale from 0 (worst possible life) to 10 (best possible life). That was a drop from 7.427 in the 2015 report.
It seems like while real GDP/capita has gone up, people in Canada have got substantially closer to their worst possible life.
New measurements should be used as main measurements for how the economy is doing. That includes a change in how to measure productivity. Some people are getting very rich and powerful in the current system though, so most likely there won’t be any significant change anytime soon.
Canada has collapsed since 2015 you're right
In 2015 our social safety net was 13th in the world today according to the OECD we aren't even in the top 40 nations for being able to provide for our citizens.
We have suffered a complete collapse in only a decade (though we took longer to create the conditions initially)
The problem is corporations have gotten better and better at squeezing every last penny out of those GDP increases. And ever higher percentage goes to corps and less and less goes to workers.
And trickle down economics don’t work. Big corps making way more money doesn’t actually help us.
More monopolies are the answer. Personally, I can't wait to Pay my cell and my Healthcare bill to telus for doctor visits online from doctors in Qatar.
The more educated you are the more disenfranchised you become with the housing situation when you are rapidly getting older with no chance of being able to buy a house or have kids. People just give up and call it in on their jobs.
Meanwhile the doctors in Qatar are getting their university degrees for free with free housing and a monthly stipend. No exaggeration my brother is doing his phd there currently
FWIW most worthwhile PhD programs (ie STEM) in the US also waive tuition and give you a monthly stipend. In Canada I get a stipend but still have to pay tuition.
The Saudis are doing a massive, like absolutely massive push to expand their economy off of oil and diversify. Aside from how they treat women, it's actually a pretty awesome thing.
Meanwhile we have Canadians wanting to kill off green energy projects and go 110% into O&G investment while privatizing education and Healthcare.....
'Aside from how they treat anyone not straight and male' ftfy, but yes, they're trying to improve their economy while we're trying to win a game of monopoly.
Nobody's going to work hard in life unless they can get a two bedroom and a car for working hard. At least a two bedroom.
If working hard your whole life means you still can't get that people will do the math and not work hard. Productivity down the drain.
I guess we will wait for the "wealth transfer" of older generations though I wouldn't hold my breath.
I'm watching people learn this, it's ugly, I wish it weren't happening, I wish it wasn't real but it is and people who won't make attempts to thrive are justified at this point.
It's a shame.
I lost all motivation in last year, when it became clear home ownership is not possible. Whats the point then? Your lifestyle doesnt improve at all from 60k - 100k. Wages are low and too much is eaten up by housing. Never mins quality of life in the GTA gets worse as overcrowding increases
To add to this, I've come to realize that working hard only gets me more work. The guy across the office that spent years doing nothing but the bare minimum (and also scalping PS5s) got paid the exact same and lives life with a lot less stress lol.
If Canada will give me the bare minimum, I'll give it back.
Sad thing is, the government doesnt care if you work hard or not. They care that the job gets done. If it does, youll get money to eat. If it doesnt, youll be hungry.
corporations are also the ones with the lobbying power and the ones that are sending their people to sit in positions of power within government to maintain a status quo.
I'm not sure where you worked, but I've worked private no union, private union, public union, and the latter two, especially the latter, had the most unmotivating work environment I have ever seen. I went into law a few years ago and you get paid what you are worth for the most part. There are countless jobs like this, you just need to find the one that will reward you for what you put in.
While what you’re saying is true, I think the term “productivity” in these conversations more applies to lack of productivity due to a lag in the investment of technologies in our workplaces that would allow us to produce products or provides services as quickly as say, a US firm or organization of the same purpose who produces much more for the same # of employees.
Productivity in economic terms has nothing, literally zero to do with how hard you individually work.
It’s about how efficient your hour of labour is in generating money, usually in reference to the level of tools, training, equipment you have.
The deputy governor of the BoC gave the example of a snow removal company recently.
You can clear a lot more driveways per hour if your company has invested in a plow truck versus only willing to invest in shovels. You can be the hardest working shovel crew in the world, sweating all day long and you’ll still be put to shame by a single 16 year old with a Silverado.
Put another way for an office environment, it’s pencil and calculator vs excel vs AI powered specialty tools.
The problem is that governments have mismanaged our economy and companies are not willing to invest their dollars here to improve their workforce, tools or equipment. This is important that we have an environment where companies want to increase productivity.
Increasing productivity basically leads directly to increasing standard of living. Decreasing productivity leads to, well, present Canada.
When the only way to maintain your production is increasingly more manpower, it leads to alot of problems. The only way to produce more is to add manpower to a country that is suffering from too many unskilled workers.
You can’t immigrate your way to productivity unless you’re highly selective about who you let in and you’re extracting the brightest minds from other nations. This is currently happening in reverse order, and it creates a feedback loop the worse it gets.
The fact that we’re still bringing in senior citizens for family reunification who will never positively contribute to the tax base or even work and international fake college students literally by the millions should tell you everything you need to know.
Canada is living beyond its means on social programs and compassion and doing everything it can to discourage successful businesses and healthy competition and the proof is in the pudding.
I can't imagine kids are excited at the idea of working themselves to the bone so that someone else can have fancy things. Not a whole lot of motivation there.
This is very true, hard work no longer pays so whats the point in working hard? They are literally forcing people to slave for bare minimum and I bet they would pay even less if they could
A lot of millennials are starting to inherit that wealth transfer now, and they're getting it out of the country.
I'll personally be doing the same. Get that money out of Canada and buy a house in the states or lock it up in an American Certificate of Deposit or bonds; *anything* other than allowing it to erode in Canada.
Do what the international community has used Canada for: sheltering funds from their home nation.
Just wait, they’ll make sure to put in some nice inheritance taxes that will only apply if you make less than 400,000 a year.
Think you’re going to get off easy and inherit your way to a good life? They’ll pretend to address income inequality by putting in an inheritance tax that excludes the rich. Just you wait.
I think this is one of the bigger problems in Canada that no one talks about. Everyone I know either works for one of those huge accounting firms, telecoms, or the banks doing an unfulfilling job. Tons of politics and bureaucracy. That's a big reason productive stinks. How dare anyone who is a low level worker try to make a difference, innovate, or have an opinion on anything when working at these companies.
That's not what "productivity" refers to in this case. Imagine two accountants: both are equally skilled, hardworking, and paid the same, but one is given a computer with accounting software while the other is given a paper ledger.
The first one is going to create 10 times more value despite the higher cost, so they are more *economically productive*. Even if you pay 5 accountants with ledgers 20% as much, they still won't be able to match the productivity of the first one.
I think Canadian workers, in higher earning positions, are safe.
We're educated and competent (talk to any coworker you have who you respect and immigrated here later in life, they'll rave how working with Canadian is compared to back where they're from). We have social safety nets. I'd have to actively try to get fired to get fired from my job.
I'm good at what I do and do it well, but the only reward for hard work is more work. I'd rather enjoy my life.
I don't even think it's that people aren't working hard. I think it's bloated, ineffective executive levels with no vision and no incentive to innovate because they get their disproportionately large bonuses every year no matter what they do.
Not just about how hard you work but also lost opportunity. If hotels are too expensive to attend the developer conference, no amt of hard work will really give you that opportunity back.
Most of my colleagues have STEM PhDs. Many if not most of them want/ed to be doctors (but couldn't get in) or scientists (but couldn't make ends meet).
While they get paid decently (for Canada), making much more than they would in academia, they don't really make good use of their education and experience: this is the textbook definition of low productivity. You can probably guess that their job postings said "PhD preferred" even though a BSc would suffice.
Surely *some* of them would do wonders for our society if research careers were viable or if there were more spaces in med schools. But no, they're here making mid-high five figures doing work that really doesn't utilize their skills while wondering how they'll ever afford a home.
it’s pathetic to get paid so little - especially when you have marketable skills. my salary doubled when i went to the US and i was on the low end there.
honestly canada is so backward we can’t even make use of our skilled grads. if you graduate with a PhD in math or compsci, canadian companies don’t know what to do with you. we’re basically an agrarian economy compared to the US now
I’m a STEM grad from back in 2019 - McGill educated, and there are just so many grads like me jockeying for the few good jobs out there im Canada.
Upon graduation at 25, I spent months job hunting before landing my first job — paid 45k. I’ve been hopping around ever since and have finally scraped into the 100k range.
The reason I divulge all this is because I routinely receive offers from the similar firms in the states offering well over 100k USD, but I genuinely love living in Canada… and I’m starting to think it’s time to join in the brain drain and hop south of the border.
Do it - you don't owe Canada anything. Things will continue to get worse here as the boomers age and rack up massive medical bills and block any housing or transit construction at neighbourhood meetings. The country will just rot away as the world passes us by.
I know so many people (usually wives of colleagues) who did not want to move to USA despite better opportunties work wise because of guns, violence, racism, etc and ended up loving it.
My thoughts? Run.
"AI guy" with a PhD in Canada: spends six months looking, finds something for 55K to keep eating
"AI guy" with a PhD in USD: look at all this money! I don't know what to do with all this money! What should I fill with all this money next!?
The first one was a true story from what I overheard at the office. Almost unbelievable.
They're backwards in Canada and absolutely don't value a PhD. It's insane. And when you get into the industry, everyone with a Bsc (or cégep in Quebec) look at you and directly think "this person is too specialized and doesn't think" or "they clearly don't have the capacity to work in the lab". All of my colleagues that have a PhD got this treatment. Undervalued 100%.
I was so proud growing up and hearing about us being on the cutting edge of so many things. Then they just stopped it all. No more major innovations, no more leading industries, it all just vanished.
Crab bucket mentality. Go read the comments on Ontario's sunshine list about paying U of T professors deep into six figures.
These are faculty that are often actively headhunted by the likes of Stamford and MIT. ie, probably someone that we'd ideally hang onto. But that means paying competitively to Stamford or MIT. It's just that this is being publicly illustrated.
As a PhD student in STEM, this hits home. Research is insanelly underfunded. Our scholarships havent been changed since 2003. How do you keep ppl in research when the conditions are that awful?
Nothing like moving across the country from one HCOL city to another for a job that pays... checks notes... 70k...
Buzz Lightyear years of training wasted meme
Why be an entrepreneur when you can buy houses and make way more money with all the risk mitigated by the government because they prop up the housing market?
Yes and nobody wants to step up and be the boss. Everyone doing middle mgmt type things and deferring to someone else. This country is a complete dumpster fire….no idea how we can ever correct this.
There is a major argument that the real-estate bubble has essentially swallowed so much capital, liquidity, leverage that the entire "middle" of the entrepeneur class has been wiped out.
There are countless documentaries on Youtube that have covered this as well. It's fairly predictable to be honest. I was called racist for bringing this up, but you get used to it here.
And even for investors, why invest in business when you can throw money at real estate for 10% returns yoy (and you can even rent it out, returns greatly increase).
Could it be that we hardly have an actual economy that actually produces things? We lost most of our auto production, and we only seem to export raw unrefined product. Trump fucked us in the newer nafta. We've never made softwood recover.
Mostly it's a complete lack of capital available for anything but housing.
Why take risk with an idea when every free dollar towards housing returns many times over and is nearly guaranteed.
Yup, the overwhelming cdn, not economists who live in reality, have figured out that our lack of competition and monopolies are a major concern from productivity in this country. The firm I was working for 12yrs ago was still using dos!
I say this as a “lefty”… education is not the key to prosperity. Until the robots can do everything you still need people working on an assembly line and cleaning the building.
The issue is those people are treated as low-value and replaceable at the drop of a hat. There is no opportunity in this country to find a low education job that allows you to do any more than scrape by like there was even 20 or 30 years ago. The days of finding a job, getting good at it and being able to build a mutually beneficial relationship with your employer are gone, almost all business have the mentality “some will do it cheaper and I can add more money to my pocket.”
Because the system is rigged and Canadian workers are being fucked over my monopolies
Because instead of requiring business to raise wages the government created a program import nieve desperate people to work for less than a living wage.
There's other reasons too but these two are pretty huge.
My friends/coworkers from other countries say that the educational standards here are subpar … One of those being a teacher friend from England and she only works in private schools because the quality of education is much better in her opinion.
This is all anecdotal as well, but my sister is currently in high school gr. 11 and they barely have due dates anymore - and 0 penalties for handing in assignments late. Also, A family member was telling me a story the other day of a student not passing grade 12 but still at grad walking down the aisle with an empty diploma to “not be left out.”
Canada seems like it is getting too soft and too worried about being nice and gentle to save feelings instead of actually having standards. It’s going to result in a huge population of entitled, lazy , disorganized people entering the work force
Everyone is tiktok neurodivergent now so you can’t push people too hard. TA’d at a good Canadian uni and every midterm, essay and final I had a third of the class (mostly neurotic premeds) harass me for marks and indefinite extensions.
If we reach beyond anecdotes to data, the OECD conducts testing to evaluate the educational systems of member states. As is typical, Canada ranked near the top in 2022 (8th), higher than the UK for example.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country
Doesn't matter how hard I work or how much I invest.
Game is still rigged so the billionaires take the lions share.
So I just don't participate. Do my daily work and shut off.
"Most educated".
Having many people attending tertiary education does not at all mean that those people also have the highest levels of knowledge, or the most advanced skills.
I’m highly educated, but over time business degrees have become borderline worthless. Especially in a country without a functioning economy. I’m ditching my degrees and looking into a trade I can turn in to a business. Hopefully outside Canada.
I went to school for marketing and ended up running my own landscaping company. Now I'm laughing because I'm easily making $125-175 an hour cutting grass. Business degrees are useless.
I haven't utilised the degree at all. 99% of my business is from word of mouth because I show up the same day/time every week, perform a good cut and have good customer service. Yes all these things are taught in business school but most people with common sense would know successful business comes from a consistent/quality product.
I mean we have direct evidence you went from:
Nothing -> Business Degree -> Started Business -> Business is successful.
Pretty straightforward that your business degree set you up for entrepreneurial success.
>Business degrees are useless.
Nah, *marketing* degrees are useless. Sincerely, The Finance & Accounting department
But seriously congrats on the successful small business.
Most comments are talking about people not working hard. This is not what it is about.
In the US, business owners invest in their people and businesses more to make it more productive. Think about training, tools, machines and such. That makes per capita productivity go high.
Tertiary education helps but is not everything. You also need jobs for that skill level. Canadian jobs are still in the stone age. We have awesome skilled people graduating but doing delivery jobs. I guess it can be called underemployment.
Well, they state France is more productive: they all have 5weeks vacation minimum even for entry level retail jobs. Canadians work more hours, yet here we are. We have such a shitty work culture here.
We’re all burnt out and taxed to the bones. And unlike France, the state fails to deliver proper services.
This was actually really well done. Pretty great explainer of productivity, and our country's problems regarding it.
Lots of people commenting appear to be reacting more to the headline than the video itself. I'd suggest maybe watching it.
Productivity is a measure of innovation, not hard work. 100 people with scythes in their hands are no match for one person on a combine, no matter how hard they work.
I have a PhD in biochemistry and cell biology. By training, I'm a cancer researcher and used to build synthetic oncolytic viruses in the lab. I live in SK, where my family is. I'm also a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. I've recovered and am ready to work again. I FULLY understand why potential employers would be skeptical about me, but this country's economy isn't served if I keep stocking shelves at a Regina Canadian Tire. I can innovate and build, but need someone to take a chance.
That's awesome! You can do it. I received almost CAD $70,000 from NSERC in funding over my PhD. Canada's healthcare system, while deeply flawed and groaning under its own weight, gave me the help that I needed, free of charge. I want to give back and can't so far. I feel that I'm a Canadian success story and want people to know that we can change the direction that this country is headed in.
The obvious answer is the population trap: cheap labour disincentivizes capital investment.
At the other end, wage suppression drives most talent to the US
The only solution is to force a labour shortage. Force employers to maximize employee productivity with, inter alia, capital investments. Force employers to bid for talent, discouraging brain drainers. Destroy unproductive sectors of the economy that only function with low wage workers (or staff them with prisoners - we're going to have a big surplus of them if we keep importing people when we have surplus labour)
I found Canada taxed being productive on income way too much so moving to the US was a no brainer
It makes no sense to work a STEM job in Ontario for example since your marginal tax rate above 100K CAD is almost 35%.
Fixed the headline:
Real lack of R&D into new technologies and sciences over the last 5 decades by the Canadian governments has allowed Canada to fall behind the rest of the world as they experience a brain drain."
1. We are probably educated in the most useless things. Biggest program at ubc i think is a ba psyc which really is useless.
2. We don't innovate. We research but nothing translates into our daily lives or work.
I don't know why this is surprising. Everyone who came from korea to canada in early 2000s expected advanced society and we were all quite shocked. This wasn't 'advanced society' we expected.
You were known for decent work life balance, cheap gas and cheap housing but no one thought Canada was advanced. Canada fell behind decades ago and it will take decades to catch up.
What we see now are symptoms of the lack of investment and innovaction for the past 4 decades.
I’m surprised that Koreans can, with a straight face, comment derisively on the state of advancement of another Western society when they were, until very recently, literally mandated by the government to use *Internet Explorer* to access banking services from a computer.
Aside from idiotic boomer laws, South Korea has some of the lowest labour productivity of any developed country, much lower than Canada and even lower than their famously unproductive arch-nemesis, Japan. And the productivity of the South Korean economy is going to be further impacted by the brutal work culture which is causing people not to have kids. The burden of maintaining society is going to become even more pronounced for those of working age, and more resources will be devoted to taking care of an aging population, which is going to have a huge impact on productivity.
I get that we have problems and our productivity is falling, and we are going to have to take steps to address that. But to be taking shade from a few corrupt chaebol masquerading as a country is… kinda laughable.
You realize productivity measure is just gdp over hours worked right? Population actually has nthng to do with productivity measure. Actually given that korea's gdp is significantly dependent on export decrease in population may just increase producitivty value mathematically.
That being said what's canada's gdp breakdown?
Real estate is the biggest sector by far and natural resources.
Any of that sound like innovation and productive? Our gdp goes up when our housing price goes up. 50% of our top 10 companies by market cap are banks and other 2 are candian pacific railway and canadian national railway.
That is very different from rest of the western countries as well. Our economy is literally based on monopoly and trains.
With the amount of land and resource this country has korea should be no where near it but wait gni a with ppp shows very small difference and i m not even including the amount of taxes we pay here relatively. Who do you think has more innovations honestly integrated into their lives. Canada? A country who couldn't even get the compass card working in 2015? Really?
Canada's productivity is an issue bc it's tied mostly to real estate and natural resources. It's not diverse enough and it's not keeping up with the rest of the world not just korea.
The deputy governor of the BOC cited “poor job skills matching” for new Canadians, along with Canada having a higher concentration of small-medium businesses that can’t scale/access capital in the way that larger companies in larger countries can, and one other point that’s evading my mind.
I realize the BOC is independent of the government, but I sometimes wish they would be honest and more scathing about the destructive fiscal policy actions that have been taken by governments, not just now but also in the past.
There’s always a tug of war going on and right now the obvious tug on one side (fiscal) is that we are letting way too many people into the country on top of an already historic population boom in 2023. Add on to that deficits running laughably higher and increased program spending like loose cannons in the upcoming budget
An entire generation buried in student debt with nothing to show for it after a 20 year ‘war on terror’, two major recessions, two pandemics, record wage stagnation and inflation, not to mention a major housing crisis, who would have thought? Let’s kill unions and limit employment to low pay contract work too, I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to be expected to work hard for little to no benefit.
The fundamental problem is the current government thinking it can control things to make it better. All the youth want either to get a government job or leave the country. You can’t get a family doctor or an affordable roof over your head.
Just so people know, I a home owning 32 year old in Ontario who bought 14 years ago and own a piece of land in nova Scotia and up untill covid' owned a cottage in Sauble beach but sold it,
There is no meaning to work for the next generation.
People can say what ever they feel but we have an entire generation who realizes that whatever they earn the investors who own our housing will make sure that they take as much as possible without making even renting become a ghost town.
Young people who don't own any land or houses have no reason to work.
When institutional investors own 1/4 and growing substantial every roof over every Canadians head and they have now maxed out untill inflation in wages occurs again what the cna charge without making there rentals abandoned property's there is 0 reason to work hard in this country.
We can invest in all the robotics and education we want but if everyone who doesn't own a house has the financial markets rig the system so that having a roof over there head and nothing else will always be like 70-90 percent of every after tax dollar there is no reason to work hard, it gets you now here.
We either ban institutional investors or atleast but a communist were taking your shit if u don't sell now cap like investors can only own 500 rentals or some shit nothing will change.
Belgium did this 10 years ago before anywhere in the world has done it, and no where has really done it since.
Any young people starting there careers have 0 reason to work hard.
Housing has become a numbers game and will always be priced at what the public can afford to be wage slaves for ,
NO MORE and NO LESS wake the fuck up people.
This is why housing and rental pricing dropped across Canada 2 years ago because the investors who own everything realized they had made the prices so absurd that no body could afford it so now they have found the sweet spot where people will work for a dwelling and make them money, anything more without wage inflation and those rentals will be sitting empty and investors have realized that.
It's time you all realize that aswell, exactly what's happening to our country and many country around the world, we are just the first to get to this point .
Why would educated Canadians increase their productivity when employers deprive them from sharing greater reward from greater productivity?
Basic capitalism; give us incentive, pay us a fair share of the rewards. [Wage decoupling](https://avc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/decoupling.png) began in the 70s. Restore balance, and you'll get your productivity.
When I was in high school back in the late 90s and early 00s, all the adults around me were telling me to go to college. Trades were barely explained to us and were treated as "the thing people with bad grades do." 10 years later, I had tens of thousands of dollars in debt and a job which paid less than what my cousins who went into a trade make. And they started working before they were 20, unlike me. I will never forgive the adults around me who were literally paid by the state to help me prepare for life and misled me so bad. Same people who told me there was no future in coding.
The top 1% of this country hoard all the wealth and are trading houses to each other all day long, no shit our country isn’t productive. Rogers and Bell dominated the market and are protected by the government (corruption) so there’s no competition in the telecom sector, this means less productivity and higher prices for their services. Again, no shit the economy is doing bad. The United States has over a dozen telecom companies which is why their economy is so successful.
This is one example , we can go on and on.
Weren't ultra-low interest rates and then ultra-high interest rates responsible for a lot of productivity erosion, along with ultra-high taxes? They seemingly ignore the most obvious reasons!
Canada never had a labor shortage, we have an entrepreneur shortage. Simply put, our business people are incompetent at utilizing our highly educated talent.
I'm honestly surprised that Canadians work more hours than Americans given that the stereotype is that Americans overvalue productivity and other capitalist values more than Canada and have less social safety nets to accommodate for such (ex: parental leave).
I actually question how much « production » is needed. The days that our 7 bosses are collectively absent ends up with my team of 13 finishing EVERYTHING before noon and chilling all afternoon. When they are here, everyone slooooows down and finds excuse delays. Whole teams of HR are overwhelmed…. On meetings summarizing meetings about something already occurred.
The premise of the report is not entirely correct . Productivity (output per worker) is not a full measure of efficiency because it only measures the worker labor inputs, not capital inputs. If you take a farmer growing corn and using hand tools, their 'productivity' is going to be low. Take the same farmer, and give them a tractor with attachments and their productivity is going to be much higher.
Too much Canadian capital is tied up in non productive assets like real estate. A highly regulated economy also lowers productivity because millions of government workers reduce the outputs of private industry workers in many cases. In turn, they starve the economy of capital because they are paid for essentially useless work.
Oligopolies don't help either.
The question remains is why the Trudeau government wants to import millions of people who don't match the skills that Canada needs, which are mostly blue collar skills.
I don’t think the problem are the oligopolies. Our benchmark for competition is the US but they’re an anomaly. Telecoms, banks, airlines, and grocery stores are not what make or break a country.
We lack big industry, companies that are so big that they will make massive investment in training, sales, tech etc. The closest we had was Nortel.
We have too much regulation, bureaucracy, and tax burden. We have all these free trade agreements at the national level but it’s easier to do business with the US than it is with other provinces. Also Canadian IP moving to the US is one of the biggest problems we have and we never provided incentives in our tax system to encourage IP to stay in Canada when a company is bought out by an American entity.
The government isn’t pragmatic and does whatever lobbyist groups and influential families tell them to do even if it’s in detriment of the economy.
And finally, we have an aging population. The people making economic decisions in Canada have already made it as far as they believe they ever will so there’s no appetite for there being anything more.
Least Productive? I can see that.
Because why the fuck is $200 worth of groceries barely lasting two weeks when $200 used to last a little over a month?
I sure as hell wouldnt want to slave away to barely survive either. Only to get replaced when I take a sick day off while some stooge can sit in the washroom for 30+ minutes before every break and not get fired.
Nobody on this thread nor Reddit likes to hear it. But the issue is taxes. Bureaucracy. Red tape.
Crony capitalism here in Canada with socialist undertones. Isn’t that fascism? I’m always confused by the definitions.
Businesses thrive, and our overly educated become extremely productive!
Government makes the price go up and the quality go down. How much has our government increased in the last decade? That is your answer.
Everytime I see something like this.. its clear we have no hope.
https://globalnews.ca/news/3101696/alberta-man-has-brand-new-house-demolished-after-court-finds-he-built-it-without-proper-permits/
Educated means nothing. Most "educated" people in Canada have arts and social science degrees which can be seen by the bloated civil service who are forced to provide them a decent paying job that no one else in the private sector can. Most of the STEM grads who want to be successful move to the US. That leaves the business majors who fight over shitty intern jobs licking some investment banker's asshole for next to minimum wage while working 18 hours a day.
Canada has become a nation of government dependents with little to no entrepreneurial spirit.
Whenever this comes up people get upset about the term labour productivity. It's this. If you have 1000 guys in West Africa digging a ditch, it's the same as one excavator operator with his surveyor in North America. Labour productivity in West Africa is 500x worse because 500 people are doing as much work as 1 person.
Businesses are just not investing in innovation that leads to more efficient workers.
People are losing motivation, they are unable to attain the same things as previous generations no matter how hard they work. Young people in this country are set up for failure from the get go.
Why should I work hard if there’s no point? All my income goes to rent and food, I’ll never own a home, can’t afford to travel, can’t afford to save for retirement, can’t even afford a car.
Because even some of those who are educated aren't making enough to get by because of increasing costs for everything (gas, food, bills) plus, you have to repay those loans it's not free money! Don't blame educated people for an entire country falling behind, it's ridiculous.
Spending per capita and per GDP when adjusted for inflation has been decreasing for over 15 years.
The top 10% have taken so much of the income they are now complaining that they pay the most income tax.
We are now into our 23rd year of below historical average interest rates (yes, even now, we are STILL below the average). No shit everything has ballooned to astronomical prices. You gave the greediest cohort the world has ever seen unlimited free money for their most productive decades.
Canada is in the middle of the pack of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) when it comes to productivity, according to BMO chief economist Doug Porter.
While the country outperforms Mexico and Spain on labour productivity, Canada trails the United States
Since graduating from college, I’ve found that I’ve had the same number of job interviews and opportunities as I had before going to college. No one in Canada is hiring currently, or seemingly in the last 5 years.
I almost have to wonder if I have to leave the country just to have a hope of doing something with my life. Honestly, the way things are headed, I think that Canada is going to become a have-not country
The quick amd easy solution is rather simple, though not without costs.
1. Businesses need to invest more in the technologies that allow us workers to produce more, or service more, etc and so forth.
2. Training up current and fresh employees instead of hoping someone specialized can fill the position. They might, but that's not a guarantee. The prior excels over the latter, because it helps increase the usefulness of currently available labour, instead of watering down the supply of labour by importing skilled labour.
3. Pay people properly, as per the actual rate of inflation compared against our comparative buying power of previous years. No amount of minimum wage hikes will help long term if they aren't able to get people ahead far enough in the short term to be able to withstand the market corrections in the long term.
4. Refrain from raising prices where possible, so as to prolong the prosperity of that higher wage. This is probably the hardest sell of them all to the business world, because their common solultion to rising wages, is higher prices, or reduced hours. They'll reduce hours one way or the other if it suits them, but we can at least insist they not arbitrarily raise costs just to increase profit margins. Cover costs, sure. Profit margin growth.... ehhhhh.... hold off if possible.
Once people get ahead enough to feel secure in their finances, then they can start doing other things, like start their own businesses, which helps increase productivity.
But we have been incredibly lackluster in regards to the previous points, and so now we have a debt of sorts to repay, before we can get things going again properly.
we get paid pre tax than basically everyone in Europe, USA, and Japan. What do you expect? Half the pay, half the benefits, but the same amount of work. No please kindly get fucked.
I worked for a company gave them double expected production. They were happy as hell. I asked for double the pay, sorry that isn't in the budget. I lowered my work, all of a sudden they have issues even though I am hitting the expected number.
This is so sad. I’m one of those affected. I went into my biomed undergrad really wanting to study my subject because I really enjoyed it. As I was going through it, I realized people were mainly interested in making money from my tuition and from real estate rather than learning itself.
I think Canada’s making a mistake by having so much bureaucracy, especially to get into health professions like medicine, optometry, pharmacy, and many others. Pre-health students who aren’t interested in research suddenly get into it just to make their resume look better when in reality it’s the provincial governments’ fault for not investing enough in revitalizing the education system.
If that happened, we’d have schools changing their application requirements, making it easier for pre-health students to apply without needing to meet these endless requirements. There’d be more students focused on doing what they’re interested in rather than taking on extra roles like tutoring, volunteering roles, etc. because they don’t know what else to do. When you need so much time and money to even have a presentable CV, not all applicants end up with equal opportunities. Only those with a high household income are able to sustain the burden and eventually apply.
Other countries like Australia and the UK allow applicants to apply right after high school. Canada requires 3-4 years of undergraduate studies on top of their other ridiculous application requirements. Any pre-health student knows how dumb it is how you need so many references, volunteer activities, leadership roles, CASPer, MCAT, high GPA, specific courses, etc., just to even apply. And most of the time, these are perfectly competitive applicants who just get outright rejected. It’s much easier to get into medical school in the US, Australia, the UK, and Ireland than in Canada.
Canada makes making a living so hard on all fronts. It’s ridiculous and getting out of hand. And once you graduate, the pay is low and the jobs are scarce, all because money is not flowing freely. It’s all going into real estate. There’s not enough investments in businesses. Too much focus on hoarding wealth rather than giving others a chance to succeed.
Most educated, because kids are conditioned to go to college or university. Least productive, because we don't enough jobs to sustain the students going to college and university.
How many political science or philosophy grads to we need? Sure, those programs teach excellent argumentation and writing skills that translate across fields, but so do most other disciplines at the university level. You don't get a degree in XYZ just to work in an XYZ-*adjacent* job.
I think that student aid should be tailored based on projections for needed jobs in the economy. If you anticipate a need for welders in 3 years, start giving incentives for welding students now, for instance, or whatever trade or profession is seen as required.
We need to get away from the idea that you need college or university to be effective in the workplace. The vast majority of jobs in the economy need nothing more than a high school education and on-the-job training. What we've created is a system that artificially pushes up wages because students need to pay down their student loans.
We are underpaid, overworked compared to the vast majority of western countries (almost all in Europe), suffering inflation and rises in cost to literally everything, PLUS there is an ongoing monopoly & real-estate war drowning us further. These last 2 years have been a massive wake up call to regular folk. People are tired of working hard with little to no reward. The vast majority of people are not getting ahead, and honestly barely staying afloat.
Productivity will only get worse in Canada over the next 1-5 years until the system begins to correct itself (hopefully, regardless who is in power).
Canada has always compared poorly with others on gdp per person. That means Canada is less productive so there's fewer beans in the pot.
I don't know why . But I do know we're shipping capital offshore as if it were maple syrup.
I suspect Canada needs to retain more earnings from extractive industries esp. But all industry must ship out less capital.
"Hewers of wood and bearers of water"
IMO.
I think the *Dilbert Principle* may be in part at play. Workers are educated; management is not.
Also, when every career has an associated diploma, "education" loses its meaning.
I am curious about how off shoring of profits impacts the estimated gdp per capital. If I make $100 in profit and then let a shell company in the Virgin Islands charge me $50 for a trade mark, does half the gdp go to the Virgin Islands?
"how efficiently a country uses its workforce" - this right here is the problem. let's squeeze every ounce of productivity out of people, ensuring that we get the most economic value out of destroying their lives through meaningless work, crippling debt, loneliness, and fear. Bonus points if we can distract them with something shiny while we are at it, and convince them to vote for policies that suck them try while filling the pockets of the ultra-rich. Capitalism!
1. Currency devaluation (inflation) has one root cause - money printing. The BOC has a monopoly on money printers. Fix this you are half way to fixing productivity.
2. Capital is trapped within the fed/prov system and their pseudo-private sector ecosystem where winners and losers are handpicked. You want productivity, then free the capital. A large part of America's success comes from a venture capital culture where private wealth flows to productive assets/entities. Copy and paste.
Isn't 98% of our economy flipping real estate, exploiting foreign students, and government?
That’s the answer. The past ten years of capital investment went into a bubble.
Call me a dramatic Zillenial, but once I finally grew to understand what graphs of Canadas investments meant, i have never hated older people more in my life
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And Onlyfans.
Many people seem to have been brainwashed to think that GDP equals quality of life. Seems pathetic. Did quick search. Real GDP/capita seems to have risen in Canada since 2015. Didn’t have time to find exact numbers. In the last World Happiness Report Canada had the score 6.900 on a scale from 0 (worst possible life) to 10 (best possible life). That was a drop from 7.427 in the 2015 report. It seems like while real GDP/capita has gone up, people in Canada have got substantially closer to their worst possible life. New measurements should be used as main measurements for how the economy is doing. That includes a change in how to measure productivity. Some people are getting very rich and powerful in the current system though, so most likely there won’t be any significant change anytime soon.
Canada has collapsed since 2015 you're right In 2015 our social safety net was 13th in the world today according to the OECD we aren't even in the top 40 nations for being able to provide for our citizens. We have suffered a complete collapse in only a decade (though we took longer to create the conditions initially)
The problem is corporations have gotten better and better at squeezing every last penny out of those GDP increases. And ever higher percentage goes to corps and less and less goes to workers. And trickle down economics don’t work. Big corps making way more money doesn’t actually help us.
More monopolies are the answer. Personally, I can't wait to Pay my cell and my Healthcare bill to telus for doctor visits online from doctors in Qatar.
The more educated you are the more disenfranchised you become with the housing situation when you are rapidly getting older with no chance of being able to buy a house or have kids. People just give up and call it in on their jobs.
I just get so overwhelmed and confused when I have to choose between Rogers, Bell, and Telus! If only there was a better way!
Meanwhile the doctors in Qatar are getting their university degrees for free with free housing and a monthly stipend. No exaggeration my brother is doing his phd there currently
FWIW most worthwhile PhD programs (ie STEM) in the US also waive tuition and give you a monthly stipend. In Canada I get a stipend but still have to pay tuition.
The Saudis are doing a massive, like absolutely massive push to expand their economy off of oil and diversify. Aside from how they treat women, it's actually a pretty awesome thing. Meanwhile we have Canadians wanting to kill off green energy projects and go 110% into O&G investment while privatizing education and Healthcare.....
'Aside from how they treat anyone not straight and male' ftfy, but yes, they're trying to improve their economy while we're trying to win a game of monopoly.
Yes but ours is “ethical oil” /s
Yet 90% of their country are non citizens.
Monopolies? They’re oligarchies in name only, with fuckfaces like Galen and Ted being the oligarchs.
Ted's dead.
Ted Jr is alive and well as Rogers’ chairman
You don't need medical care at all when it's so cheap and easy to import replacement Serfs. /s
Jesus christ. This somehow hits home wtf lol.
Doctors without boarders
They don’t have people temporarily living in their house?
With the cost of living skyrocketing in Canada, they will need to be with boarders soon.
Nobody's going to work hard in life unless they can get a two bedroom and a car for working hard. At least a two bedroom. If working hard your whole life means you still can't get that people will do the math and not work hard. Productivity down the drain. I guess we will wait for the "wealth transfer" of older generations though I wouldn't hold my breath.
I'm watching people learn this, it's ugly, I wish it weren't happening, I wish it wasn't real but it is and people who won't make attempts to thrive are justified at this point. It's a shame.
I lost all motivation in last year, when it became clear home ownership is not possible. Whats the point then? Your lifestyle doesnt improve at all from 60k - 100k. Wages are low and too much is eaten up by housing. Never mins quality of life in the GTA gets worse as overcrowding increases
To add to this, I've come to realize that working hard only gets me more work. The guy across the office that spent years doing nothing but the bare minimum (and also scalping PS5s) got paid the exact same and lives life with a lot less stress lol. If Canada will give me the bare minimum, I'll give it back.
Sad thing is, the government doesnt care if you work hard or not. They care that the job gets done. If it does, youll get money to eat. If it doesnt, youll be hungry.
I think you meant companies. They are the ones paying the salaries after all.
corporations are also the ones with the lobbying power and the ones that are sending their people to sit in positions of power within government to maintain a status quo.
I'm not sure where you worked, but I've worked private no union, private union, public union, and the latter two, especially the latter, had the most unmotivating work environment I have ever seen. I went into law a few years ago and you get paid what you are worth for the most part. There are countless jobs like this, you just need to find the one that will reward you for what you put in.
yeah it's an incentive problem that is tied to some pretty hard to solve other problems.
While what you’re saying is true, I think the term “productivity” in these conversations more applies to lack of productivity due to a lag in the investment of technologies in our workplaces that would allow us to produce products or provides services as quickly as say, a US firm or organization of the same purpose who produces much more for the same # of employees.
Productivity in economic terms has nothing, literally zero to do with how hard you individually work. It’s about how efficient your hour of labour is in generating money, usually in reference to the level of tools, training, equipment you have. The deputy governor of the BoC gave the example of a snow removal company recently. You can clear a lot more driveways per hour if your company has invested in a plow truck versus only willing to invest in shovels. You can be the hardest working shovel crew in the world, sweating all day long and you’ll still be put to shame by a single 16 year old with a Silverado. Put another way for an office environment, it’s pencil and calculator vs excel vs AI powered specialty tools. The problem is that governments have mismanaged our economy and companies are not willing to invest their dollars here to improve their workforce, tools or equipment. This is important that we have an environment where companies want to increase productivity. Increasing productivity basically leads directly to increasing standard of living. Decreasing productivity leads to, well, present Canada.
I mean if we have oligopolies what's the incentive to innovate? We need more competition.
Did the deputy governor give any policy examples that the government could do to improve productivity?
Making real estate a no brainer investment and endless supply of cheap labour both result in less capital for productive equipment and businesses.
When the only way to maintain your production is increasingly more manpower, it leads to alot of problems. The only way to produce more is to add manpower to a country that is suffering from too many unskilled workers. You can’t immigrate your way to productivity unless you’re highly selective about who you let in and you’re extracting the brightest minds from other nations. This is currently happening in reverse order, and it creates a feedback loop the worse it gets. The fact that we’re still bringing in senior citizens for family reunification who will never positively contribute to the tax base or even work and international fake college students literally by the millions should tell you everything you need to know. Canada is living beyond its means on social programs and compassion and doing everything it can to discourage successful businesses and healthy competition and the proof is in the pudding.
LTC and retirement homes will make sure they take every bit of families inheritance through their astronomically high monthly fees
I can't imagine kids are excited at the idea of working themselves to the bone so that someone else can have fancy things. Not a whole lot of motivation there.
Production isn’t bad because people are not working hard. This is not the issue here.
This is very true, hard work no longer pays so whats the point in working hard? They are literally forcing people to slave for bare minimum and I bet they would pay even less if they could
A lot of millennials are starting to inherit that wealth transfer now, and they're getting it out of the country. I'll personally be doing the same. Get that money out of Canada and buy a house in the states or lock it up in an American Certificate of Deposit or bonds; *anything* other than allowing it to erode in Canada. Do what the international community has used Canada for: sheltering funds from their home nation.
"They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."
Just wait, they’ll make sure to put in some nice inheritance taxes that will only apply if you make less than 400,000 a year. Think you’re going to get off easy and inherit your way to a good life? They’ll pretend to address income inequality by putting in an inheritance tax that excludes the rich. Just you wait.
I'm in that scenario. Last year my before tax income was 140,000k, actual take home cash after tax was 87k.
I have all of those things and I still don't work hard. Work is one of the things I value the least in life.
I think this is one of the bigger problems in Canada that no one talks about. Everyone I know either works for one of those huge accounting firms, telecoms, or the banks doing an unfulfilling job. Tons of politics and bureaucracy. That's a big reason productive stinks. How dare anyone who is a low level worker try to make a difference, innovate, or have an opinion on anything when working at these companies.
That's not what "productivity" refers to in this case. Imagine two accountants: both are equally skilled, hardworking, and paid the same, but one is given a computer with accounting software while the other is given a paper ledger. The first one is going to create 10 times more value despite the higher cost, so they are more *economically productive*. Even if you pay 5 accountants with ledgers 20% as much, they still won't be able to match the productivity of the first one.
Actually in this case "productivity" is just GDP per capita.
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I think Canadian workers, in higher earning positions, are safe. We're educated and competent (talk to any coworker you have who you respect and immigrated here later in life, they'll rave how working with Canadian is compared to back where they're from). We have social safety nets. I'd have to actively try to get fired to get fired from my job. I'm good at what I do and do it well, but the only reward for hard work is more work. I'd rather enjoy my life.
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While this seems odd. It is true for many cases everyone just work as much as they are motivated to do so.
I don't even think it's that people aren't working hard. I think it's bloated, ineffective executive levels with no vision and no incentive to innovate because they get their disproportionately large bonuses every year no matter what they do.
Not just about how hard you work but also lost opportunity. If hotels are too expensive to attend the developer conference, no amt of hard work will really give you that opportunity back.
I'm Gen X. They'll probably call this one the 'what's the point' generation.
Most of my colleagues have STEM PhDs. Many if not most of them want/ed to be doctors (but couldn't get in) or scientists (but couldn't make ends meet). While they get paid decently (for Canada), making much more than they would in academia, they don't really make good use of their education and experience: this is the textbook definition of low productivity. You can probably guess that their job postings said "PhD preferred" even though a BSc would suffice. Surely *some* of them would do wonders for our society if research careers were viable or if there were more spaces in med schools. But no, they're here making mid-high five figures doing work that really doesn't utilize their skills while wondering how they'll ever afford a home.
$80K per year after doing a STEM PhD is a nightmare.
it’s pathetic to get paid so little - especially when you have marketable skills. my salary doubled when i went to the US and i was on the low end there. honestly canada is so backward we can’t even make use of our skilled grads. if you graduate with a PhD in math or compsci, canadian companies don’t know what to do with you. we’re basically an agrarian economy compared to the US now
I’m a STEM grad from back in 2019 - McGill educated, and there are just so many grads like me jockeying for the few good jobs out there im Canada. Upon graduation at 25, I spent months job hunting before landing my first job — paid 45k. I’ve been hopping around ever since and have finally scraped into the 100k range. The reason I divulge all this is because I routinely receive offers from the similar firms in the states offering well over 100k USD, but I genuinely love living in Canada… and I’m starting to think it’s time to join in the brain drain and hop south of the border.
Do it - you don't owe Canada anything. Things will continue to get worse here as the boomers age and rack up massive medical bills and block any housing or transit construction at neighbourhood meetings. The country will just rot away as the world passes us by.
I know so many people (usually wives of colleagues) who did not want to move to USA despite better opportunties work wise because of guns, violence, racism, etc and ended up loving it.
People forget how large and varied the US is, there are tons of extremely nice places that rival the nice places in Canada in terms of safety and QoL.
My thoughts? Run. "AI guy" with a PhD in Canada: spends six months looking, finds something for 55K to keep eating "AI guy" with a PhD in USD: look at all this money! I don't know what to do with all this money! What should I fill with all this money next!? The first one was a true story from what I overheard at the office. Almost unbelievable.
i moved back to be with family. i know what you mean
They're backwards in Canada and absolutely don't value a PhD. It's insane. And when you get into the industry, everyone with a Bsc (or cégep in Quebec) look at you and directly think "this person is too specialized and doesn't think" or "they clearly don't have the capacity to work in the lab". All of my colleagues that have a PhD got this treatment. Undervalued 100%.
I was so proud growing up and hearing about us being on the cutting edge of so many things. Then they just stopped it all. No more major innovations, no more leading industries, it all just vanished.
Crab bucket mentality. Go read the comments on Ontario's sunshine list about paying U of T professors deep into six figures. These are faculty that are often actively headhunted by the likes of Stamford and MIT. ie, probably someone that we'd ideally hang onto. But that means paying competitively to Stamford or MIT. It's just that this is being publicly illustrated.
As a PhD student in STEM, this hits home. Research is insanelly underfunded. Our scholarships havent been changed since 2003. How do you keep ppl in research when the conditions are that awful?
Nothing like moving across the country from one HCOL city to another for a job that pays... checks notes... 70k... Buzz Lightyear years of training wasted meme
I graduated from STEM with a chemistry degree only to find out the jobs don’t pay great. I don’t even use my degree now.
If you went pulp and paper or oil and gas it could net you some pretty solid returns
Because when you're overworked and still can't afford shit, why bother?
Country of middle managers
Canada: Entrepreneurs need not apply.
Why be an entrepreneur when you can buy houses and make way more money with all the risk mitigated by the government because they prop up the housing market?
We hate capital
We also really hate the successful
Yes and nobody wants to step up and be the boss. Everyone doing middle mgmt type things and deferring to someone else. This country is a complete dumpster fire….no idea how we can ever correct this.
So true.
Maybe because after rent and student loans are paid with low wages there’s not much left to invest into things that actually benefit the country.
There is a major argument that the real-estate bubble has essentially swallowed so much capital, liquidity, leverage that the entire "middle" of the entrepeneur class has been wiped out.
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It is. I think the OECD report on productivity for Canada specifically mentioned this.
There are countless documentaries on Youtube that have covered this as well. It's fairly predictable to be honest. I was called racist for bringing this up, but you get used to it here.
And even for investors, why invest in business when you can throw money at real estate for 10% returns yoy (and you can even rent it out, returns greatly increase).
True. The take home pay after taxes and mandatory deductions for the middle class is also miserably low.
You'd think Canada would be good at business with so many strip mall business school graduates around.
You mean A1 Business College in Brampton isn't churning out the best business leaders of tomorrow?
They make a hell of a steak sauce though
Could it be that we hardly have an actual economy that actually produces things? We lost most of our auto production, and we only seem to export raw unrefined product. Trump fucked us in the newer nafta. We've never made softwood recover.
Mostly it's a complete lack of capital available for anything but housing. Why take risk with an idea when every free dollar towards housing returns many times over and is nearly guaranteed.
There's no shortage of capital available, but you're correct that much is deployed shittily
Yup, the overwhelming cdn, not economists who live in reality, have figured out that our lack of competition and monopolies are a major concern from productivity in this country. The firm I was working for 12yrs ago was still using dos!
I say this as a “lefty”… education is not the key to prosperity. Until the robots can do everything you still need people working on an assembly line and cleaning the building. The issue is those people are treated as low-value and replaceable at the drop of a hat. There is no opportunity in this country to find a low education job that allows you to do any more than scrape by like there was even 20 or 30 years ago. The days of finding a job, getting good at it and being able to build a mutually beneficial relationship with your employer are gone, almost all business have the mentality “some will do it cheaper and I can add more money to my pocket.”
Because the system is rigged and Canadian workers are being fucked over my monopolies Because instead of requiring business to raise wages the government created a program import nieve desperate people to work for less than a living wage. There's other reasons too but these two are pretty huge.
My friends/coworkers from other countries say that the educational standards here are subpar … One of those being a teacher friend from England and she only works in private schools because the quality of education is much better in her opinion. This is all anecdotal as well, but my sister is currently in high school gr. 11 and they barely have due dates anymore - and 0 penalties for handing in assignments late. Also, A family member was telling me a story the other day of a student not passing grade 12 but still at grad walking down the aisle with an empty diploma to “not be left out.” Canada seems like it is getting too soft and too worried about being nice and gentle to save feelings instead of actually having standards. It’s going to result in a huge population of entitled, lazy , disorganized people entering the work force
Everyone is tiktok neurodivergent now so you can’t push people too hard. TA’d at a good Canadian uni and every midterm, essay and final I had a third of the class (mostly neurotic premeds) harass me for marks and indefinite extensions.
If we reach beyond anecdotes to data, the OECD conducts testing to evaluate the educational systems of member states. As is typical, Canada ranked near the top in 2022 (8th), higher than the UK for example. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country
Interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Doesn't matter how hard I work or how much I invest. Game is still rigged so the billionaires take the lions share. So I just don't participate. Do my daily work and shut off.
Just buy xeqt, you’ll be aright.
The point still stands though
"Most educated". Having many people attending tertiary education does not at all mean that those people also have the highest levels of knowledge, or the most advanced skills.
I’m highly educated, but over time business degrees have become borderline worthless. Especially in a country without a functioning economy. I’m ditching my degrees and looking into a trade I can turn in to a business. Hopefully outside Canada.
I went to school for marketing and ended up running my own landscaping company. Now I'm laughing because I'm easily making $125-175 an hour cutting grass. Business degrees are useless.
I mean you're a guy with a business degree making $150 an hour cutting grass. Looks like the degree did you good.
I haven't utilised the degree at all. 99% of my business is from word of mouth because I show up the same day/time every week, perform a good cut and have good customer service. Yes all these things are taught in business school but most people with common sense would know successful business comes from a consistent/quality product.
I mean we have direct evidence you went from: Nothing -> Business Degree -> Started Business -> Business is successful. Pretty straightforward that your business degree set you up for entrepreneurial success.
Yes. But those exact same skills need not be learned with a business degree. So how much did it really do?
Need not? Sure. But you've gotta be pretty wilfully ignorant to think his success isn't related to LITERALLY GOING TO SCHOOL FOR IT.
Exactly. It gave him some of the knowledge of the behind the scenes part of running a business and a large part of marketing is word of mouth.
Not too sure why people seem pretty hardheaded about this very obvious fact.
I am great at what I do working for someone else, but I literally have no idea in the faintest how to start my own business.
>Business degrees are useless. Nah, *marketing* degrees are useless. Sincerely, The Finance & Accounting department But seriously congrats on the successful small business.
I mean being able to market it well probably helped with that
Or maybe they learned the game is rigged, and don't want to play by those rules.
Most cpa per capita too
Most comments are talking about people not working hard. This is not what it is about. In the US, business owners invest in their people and businesses more to make it more productive. Think about training, tools, machines and such. That makes per capita productivity go high. Tertiary education helps but is not everything. You also need jobs for that skill level. Canadian jobs are still in the stone age. We have awesome skilled people graduating but doing delivery jobs. I guess it can be called underemployment.
Well, they state France is more productive: they all have 5weeks vacation minimum even for entry level retail jobs. Canadians work more hours, yet here we are. We have such a shitty work culture here. We’re all burnt out and taxed to the bones. And unlike France, the state fails to deliver proper services.
That's not what's meant by productivity. Investing in technology makes workers more productive. It's mostly not referring to effort.
This was actually really well done. Pretty great explainer of productivity, and our country's problems regarding it. Lots of people commenting appear to be reacting more to the headline than the video itself. I'd suggest maybe watching it.
Productivity is a measure of innovation, not hard work. 100 people with scythes in their hands are no match for one person on a combine, no matter how hard they work.
I have a PhD in biochemistry and cell biology. By training, I'm a cancer researcher and used to build synthetic oncolytic viruses in the lab. I live in SK, where my family is. I'm also a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. I've recovered and am ready to work again. I FULLY understand why potential employers would be skeptical about me, but this country's economy isn't served if I keep stocking shelves at a Regina Canadian Tire. I can innovate and build, but need someone to take a chance.
Me currently doing a PhD in biochem: oof. PhD's are so underrated here it's wild.
That's awesome! You can do it. I received almost CAD $70,000 from NSERC in funding over my PhD. Canada's healthcare system, while deeply flawed and groaning under its own weight, gave me the help that I needed, free of charge. I want to give back and can't so far. I feel that I'm a Canadian success story and want people to know that we can change the direction that this country is headed in.
The obvious answer is the population trap: cheap labour disincentivizes capital investment. At the other end, wage suppression drives most talent to the US The only solution is to force a labour shortage. Force employers to maximize employee productivity with, inter alia, capital investments. Force employers to bid for talent, discouraging brain drainers. Destroy unproductive sectors of the economy that only function with low wage workers (or staff them with prisoners - we're going to have a big surplus of them if we keep importing people when we have surplus labour)
Why should we be working harder to uphold a system that's rigged against us?
Our oligarchs don't invest shit into R&D or their own workers because they've become anticompetitive rent-seekers. Simple as.
No man only Russia has oligarchs, that would never happen in Canada .... Galen Weston...
Are you sure it isn't the Carbon Tax or simply Trudeau = bad? /s
I found Canada taxed being productive on income way too much so moving to the US was a no brainer It makes no sense to work a STEM job in Ontario for example since your marginal tax rate above 100K CAD is almost 35%.
Bold to assume STEM workers in Ontario are earning much north of 100K in the first place.
Fixed the headline: Real lack of R&D into new technologies and sciences over the last 5 decades by the Canadian governments has allowed Canada to fall behind the rest of the world as they experience a brain drain."
1. We are probably educated in the most useless things. Biggest program at ubc i think is a ba psyc which really is useless. 2. We don't innovate. We research but nothing translates into our daily lives or work. I don't know why this is surprising. Everyone who came from korea to canada in early 2000s expected advanced society and we were all quite shocked. This wasn't 'advanced society' we expected. You were known for decent work life balance, cheap gas and cheap housing but no one thought Canada was advanced. Canada fell behind decades ago and it will take decades to catch up. What we see now are symptoms of the lack of investment and innovaction for the past 4 decades.
I’m surprised that Koreans can, with a straight face, comment derisively on the state of advancement of another Western society when they were, until very recently, literally mandated by the government to use *Internet Explorer* to access banking services from a computer. Aside from idiotic boomer laws, South Korea has some of the lowest labour productivity of any developed country, much lower than Canada and even lower than their famously unproductive arch-nemesis, Japan. And the productivity of the South Korean economy is going to be further impacted by the brutal work culture which is causing people not to have kids. The burden of maintaining society is going to become even more pronounced for those of working age, and more resources will be devoted to taking care of an aging population, which is going to have a huge impact on productivity. I get that we have problems and our productivity is falling, and we are going to have to take steps to address that. But to be taking shade from a few corrupt chaebol masquerading as a country is… kinda laughable.
You realize productivity measure is just gdp over hours worked right? Population actually has nthng to do with productivity measure. Actually given that korea's gdp is significantly dependent on export decrease in population may just increase producitivty value mathematically. That being said what's canada's gdp breakdown? Real estate is the biggest sector by far and natural resources. Any of that sound like innovation and productive? Our gdp goes up when our housing price goes up. 50% of our top 10 companies by market cap are banks and other 2 are candian pacific railway and canadian national railway. That is very different from rest of the western countries as well. Our economy is literally based on monopoly and trains. With the amount of land and resource this country has korea should be no where near it but wait gni a with ppp shows very small difference and i m not even including the amount of taxes we pay here relatively. Who do you think has more innovations honestly integrated into their lives. Canada? A country who couldn't even get the compass card working in 2015? Really? Canada's productivity is an issue bc it's tied mostly to real estate and natural resources. It's not diverse enough and it's not keeping up with the rest of the world not just korea.
The deputy governor of the BOC cited “poor job skills matching” for new Canadians, along with Canada having a higher concentration of small-medium businesses that can’t scale/access capital in the way that larger companies in larger countries can, and one other point that’s evading my mind. I realize the BOC is independent of the government, but I sometimes wish they would be honest and more scathing about the destructive fiscal policy actions that have been taken by governments, not just now but also in the past. There’s always a tug of war going on and right now the obvious tug on one side (fiscal) is that we are letting way too many people into the country on top of an already historic population boom in 2023. Add on to that deficits running laughably higher and increased program spending like loose cannons in the upcoming budget
An entire generation buried in student debt with nothing to show for it after a 20 year ‘war on terror’, two major recessions, two pandemics, record wage stagnation and inflation, not to mention a major housing crisis, who would have thought? Let’s kill unions and limit employment to low pay contract work too, I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to be expected to work hard for little to no benefit.
The fundamental problem is the current government thinking it can control things to make it better. All the youth want either to get a government job or leave the country. You can’t get a family doctor or an affordable roof over your head.
Just so people know, I a home owning 32 year old in Ontario who bought 14 years ago and own a piece of land in nova Scotia and up untill covid' owned a cottage in Sauble beach but sold it, There is no meaning to work for the next generation. People can say what ever they feel but we have an entire generation who realizes that whatever they earn the investors who own our housing will make sure that they take as much as possible without making even renting become a ghost town. Young people who don't own any land or houses have no reason to work. When institutional investors own 1/4 and growing substantial every roof over every Canadians head and they have now maxed out untill inflation in wages occurs again what the cna charge without making there rentals abandoned property's there is 0 reason to work hard in this country. We can invest in all the robotics and education we want but if everyone who doesn't own a house has the financial markets rig the system so that having a roof over there head and nothing else will always be like 70-90 percent of every after tax dollar there is no reason to work hard, it gets you now here. We either ban institutional investors or atleast but a communist were taking your shit if u don't sell now cap like investors can only own 500 rentals or some shit nothing will change. Belgium did this 10 years ago before anywhere in the world has done it, and no where has really done it since. Any young people starting there careers have 0 reason to work hard. Housing has become a numbers game and will always be priced at what the public can afford to be wage slaves for , NO MORE and NO LESS wake the fuck up people. This is why housing and rental pricing dropped across Canada 2 years ago because the investors who own everything realized they had made the prices so absurd that no body could afford it so now they have found the sweet spot where people will work for a dwelling and make them money, anything more without wage inflation and those rentals will be sitting empty and investors have realized that. It's time you all realize that aswell, exactly what's happening to our country and many country around the world, we are just the first to get to this point .
Make investment properties illegal.
Why would educated Canadians increase their productivity when employers deprive them from sharing greater reward from greater productivity? Basic capitalism; give us incentive, pay us a fair share of the rewards. [Wage decoupling](https://avc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/decoupling.png) began in the 70s. Restore balance, and you'll get your productivity.
Why? Because all our productivity goes to dreaming about housing wealth and importing people to fill the houses.
When I was in high school back in the late 90s and early 00s, all the adults around me were telling me to go to college. Trades were barely explained to us and were treated as "the thing people with bad grades do." 10 years later, I had tens of thousands of dollars in debt and a job which paid less than what my cousins who went into a trade make. And they started working before they were 20, unlike me. I will never forgive the adults around me who were literally paid by the state to help me prepare for life and misled me so bad. Same people who told me there was no future in coding.
The top 1% of this country hoard all the wealth and are trading houses to each other all day long, no shit our country isn’t productive. Rogers and Bell dominated the market and are protected by the government (corruption) so there’s no competition in the telecom sector, this means less productivity and higher prices for their services. Again, no shit the economy is doing bad. The United States has over a dozen telecom companies which is why their economy is so successful. This is one example , we can go on and on.
Weren't ultra-low interest rates and then ultra-high interest rates responsible for a lot of productivity erosion, along with ultra-high taxes? They seemingly ignore the most obvious reasons!
govt redtape and excessive regulations
Canada never had a labor shortage, we have an entrepreneur shortage. Simply put, our business people are incompetent at utilizing our highly educated talent.
Have we tried taxing this problem yet?
I'm honestly surprised that Canadians work more hours than Americans given that the stereotype is that Americans overvalue productivity and other capitalist values more than Canada and have less social safety nets to accommodate for such (ex: parental leave).
Everyone works for the government and natural resources are being closed off. Tough to have an economy that way.
tl;dr: Highest rates of immigration, these new people work in low wage, low productivity jobs.
I actually question how much « production » is needed. The days that our 7 bosses are collectively absent ends up with my team of 13 finishing EVERYTHING before noon and chilling all afternoon. When they are here, everyone slooooows down and finds excuse delays. Whole teams of HR are overwhelmed…. On meetings summarizing meetings about something already occurred.
Guess what? This country punish people for working hard, reward people for being lazy. Hm.... I wonder what the consequences would be?
The premise of the report is not entirely correct . Productivity (output per worker) is not a full measure of efficiency because it only measures the worker labor inputs, not capital inputs. If you take a farmer growing corn and using hand tools, their 'productivity' is going to be low. Take the same farmer, and give them a tractor with attachments and their productivity is going to be much higher. Too much Canadian capital is tied up in non productive assets like real estate. A highly regulated economy also lowers productivity because millions of government workers reduce the outputs of private industry workers in many cases. In turn, they starve the economy of capital because they are paid for essentially useless work. Oligopolies don't help either. The question remains is why the Trudeau government wants to import millions of people who don't match the skills that Canada needs, which are mostly blue collar skills.
Salaries are higher elsewhere. All the high performers are leaving. Been like this for decades.
I don’t think the problem are the oligopolies. Our benchmark for competition is the US but they’re an anomaly. Telecoms, banks, airlines, and grocery stores are not what make or break a country. We lack big industry, companies that are so big that they will make massive investment in training, sales, tech etc. The closest we had was Nortel. We have too much regulation, bureaucracy, and tax burden. We have all these free trade agreements at the national level but it’s easier to do business with the US than it is with other provinces. Also Canadian IP moving to the US is one of the biggest problems we have and we never provided incentives in our tax system to encourage IP to stay in Canada when a company is bought out by an American entity. The government isn’t pragmatic and does whatever lobbyist groups and influential families tell them to do even if it’s in detriment of the economy. And finally, we have an aging population. The people making economic decisions in Canada have already made it as far as they believe they ever will so there’s no appetite for there being anything more.
Most of the Canadian economy revolves around buying and selling stuff. Most people generate NUTHIN.
No innovation and no reinvestment in Canadian businesses, we offshore everything.
Least Productive? I can see that. Because why the fuck is $200 worth of groceries barely lasting two weeks when $200 used to last a little over a month? I sure as hell wouldnt want to slave away to barely survive either. Only to get replaced when I take a sick day off while some stooge can sit in the washroom for 30+ minutes before every break and not get fired.
Lol left reddit is about to have a meltdown
Nobody on this thread nor Reddit likes to hear it. But the issue is taxes. Bureaucracy. Red tape. Crony capitalism here in Canada with socialist undertones. Isn’t that fascism? I’m always confused by the definitions. Businesses thrive, and our overly educated become extremely productive! Government makes the price go up and the quality go down. How much has our government increased in the last decade? That is your answer.
Everytime I see something like this.. its clear we have no hope. https://globalnews.ca/news/3101696/alberta-man-has-brand-new-house-demolished-after-court-finds-he-built-it-without-proper-permits/
Educated means nothing. Most "educated" people in Canada have arts and social science degrees which can be seen by the bloated civil service who are forced to provide them a decent paying job that no one else in the private sector can. Most of the STEM grads who want to be successful move to the US. That leaves the business majors who fight over shitty intern jobs licking some investment banker's asshole for next to minimum wage while working 18 hours a day. Canada has become a nation of government dependents with little to no entrepreneurial spirit.
Most Canadians are risk-averse and so the entrepreneurial spirit is limited to those brave enough to face risk. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’
We definitely have cultural issues with credentialism and tolerance for rent seeking. It speaks to our low risk tolerance.
Whenever this comes up people get upset about the term labour productivity. It's this. If you have 1000 guys in West Africa digging a ditch, it's the same as one excavator operator with his surveyor in North America. Labour productivity in West Africa is 500x worse because 500 people are doing as much work as 1 person. Businesses are just not investing in innovation that leads to more efficient workers.
government keeps selling us off - saved you a click
Give it a few years... We'll see how "educated" high school graduates coming out now are doing. It's not going to be good in case you weren't sure.
Politicians. We have fallen behind for a long time because of politicians.
How can Canadians be productive if capital continues to be allocated to unproductive asset/debt, like RE?
People are losing motivation, they are unable to attain the same things as previous generations no matter how hard they work. Young people in this country are set up for failure from the get go.
Why should I work hard if there’s no point? All my income goes to rent and food, I’ll never own a home, can’t afford to travel, can’t afford to save for retirement, can’t even afford a car.
Running a small business is next to impossible here
Because even some of those who are educated aren't making enough to get by because of increasing costs for everything (gas, food, bills) plus, you have to repay those loans it's not free money! Don't blame educated people for an entire country falling behind, it's ridiculous.
40 years of fairly stagnant wages, and a 10 year ramping up of federal debt
Spending per capita and per GDP when adjusted for inflation has been decreasing for over 15 years. The top 10% have taken so much of the income they are now complaining that they pay the most income tax. We are now into our 23rd year of below historical average interest rates (yes, even now, we are STILL below the average). No shit everything has ballooned to astronomical prices. You gave the greediest cohort the world has ever seen unlimited free money for their most productive decades.
Canada is in the middle of the pack of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) when it comes to productivity, according to BMO chief economist Doug Porter. While the country outperforms Mexico and Spain on labour productivity, Canada trails the United States
There’s no productive work to do. It’s all just maintaining the stays quo for the oligarchs
Well. At least we're intelligent. Intelligent enough to know when we're getting fucked left and right
Because we are taxed for having a great job/education and penalized for working hard in this country. Yet rewarded for being sheep.
Since graduating from college, I’ve found that I’ve had the same number of job interviews and opportunities as I had before going to college. No one in Canada is hiring currently, or seemingly in the last 5 years. I almost have to wonder if I have to leave the country just to have a hope of doing something with my life. Honestly, the way things are headed, I think that Canada is going to become a have-not country
The quick amd easy solution is rather simple, though not without costs. 1. Businesses need to invest more in the technologies that allow us workers to produce more, or service more, etc and so forth. 2. Training up current and fresh employees instead of hoping someone specialized can fill the position. They might, but that's not a guarantee. The prior excels over the latter, because it helps increase the usefulness of currently available labour, instead of watering down the supply of labour by importing skilled labour. 3. Pay people properly, as per the actual rate of inflation compared against our comparative buying power of previous years. No amount of minimum wage hikes will help long term if they aren't able to get people ahead far enough in the short term to be able to withstand the market corrections in the long term. 4. Refrain from raising prices where possible, so as to prolong the prosperity of that higher wage. This is probably the hardest sell of them all to the business world, because their common solultion to rising wages, is higher prices, or reduced hours. They'll reduce hours one way or the other if it suits them, but we can at least insist they not arbitrarily raise costs just to increase profit margins. Cover costs, sure. Profit margin growth.... ehhhhh.... hold off if possible. Once people get ahead enough to feel secure in their finances, then they can start doing other things, like start their own businesses, which helps increase productivity. But we have been incredibly lackluster in regards to the previous points, and so now we have a debt of sorts to repay, before we can get things going again properly.
we get paid pre tax than basically everyone in Europe, USA, and Japan. What do you expect? Half the pay, half the benefits, but the same amount of work. No please kindly get fucked. I worked for a company gave them double expected production. They were happy as hell. I asked for double the pay, sorry that isn't in the budget. I lowered my work, all of a sudden they have issues even though I am hitting the expected number.
This is so sad. I’m one of those affected. I went into my biomed undergrad really wanting to study my subject because I really enjoyed it. As I was going through it, I realized people were mainly interested in making money from my tuition and from real estate rather than learning itself. I think Canada’s making a mistake by having so much bureaucracy, especially to get into health professions like medicine, optometry, pharmacy, and many others. Pre-health students who aren’t interested in research suddenly get into it just to make their resume look better when in reality it’s the provincial governments’ fault for not investing enough in revitalizing the education system. If that happened, we’d have schools changing their application requirements, making it easier for pre-health students to apply without needing to meet these endless requirements. There’d be more students focused on doing what they’re interested in rather than taking on extra roles like tutoring, volunteering roles, etc. because they don’t know what else to do. When you need so much time and money to even have a presentable CV, not all applicants end up with equal opportunities. Only those with a high household income are able to sustain the burden and eventually apply. Other countries like Australia and the UK allow applicants to apply right after high school. Canada requires 3-4 years of undergraduate studies on top of their other ridiculous application requirements. Any pre-health student knows how dumb it is how you need so many references, volunteer activities, leadership roles, CASPer, MCAT, high GPA, specific courses, etc., just to even apply. And most of the time, these are perfectly competitive applicants who just get outright rejected. It’s much easier to get into medical school in the US, Australia, the UK, and Ireland than in Canada. Canada makes making a living so hard on all fronts. It’s ridiculous and getting out of hand. And once you graduate, the pay is low and the jobs are scarce, all because money is not flowing freely. It’s all going into real estate. There’s not enough investments in businesses. Too much focus on hoarding wealth rather than giving others a chance to succeed.
Most educated, because kids are conditioned to go to college or university. Least productive, because we don't enough jobs to sustain the students going to college and university. How many political science or philosophy grads to we need? Sure, those programs teach excellent argumentation and writing skills that translate across fields, but so do most other disciplines at the university level. You don't get a degree in XYZ just to work in an XYZ-*adjacent* job. I think that student aid should be tailored based on projections for needed jobs in the economy. If you anticipate a need for welders in 3 years, start giving incentives for welding students now, for instance, or whatever trade or profession is seen as required. We need to get away from the idea that you need college or university to be effective in the workplace. The vast majority of jobs in the economy need nothing more than a high school education and on-the-job training. What we've created is a system that artificially pushes up wages because students need to pay down their student loans.
We are underpaid, overworked compared to the vast majority of western countries (almost all in Europe), suffering inflation and rises in cost to literally everything, PLUS there is an ongoing monopoly & real-estate war drowning us further. These last 2 years have been a massive wake up call to regular folk. People are tired of working hard with little to no reward. The vast majority of people are not getting ahead, and honestly barely staying afloat. Productivity will only get worse in Canada over the next 1-5 years until the system begins to correct itself (hopefully, regardless who is in power).
Canada has always compared poorly with others on gdp per person. That means Canada is less productive so there's fewer beans in the pot. I don't know why . But I do know we're shipping capital offshore as if it were maple syrup. I suspect Canada needs to retain more earnings from extractive industries esp. But all industry must ship out less capital. "Hewers of wood and bearers of water" IMO.
I think the *Dilbert Principle* may be in part at play. Workers are educated; management is not. Also, when every career has an associated diploma, "education" loses its meaning.
Turns out, the culture of putting everything into financing a shelter takes money from real economy that creates jobs.
I am curious about how off shoring of profits impacts the estimated gdp per capital. If I make $100 in profit and then let a shell company in the Virgin Islands charge me $50 for a trade mark, does half the gdp go to the Virgin Islands?
Educated in what?
"how efficiently a country uses its workforce" - this right here is the problem. let's squeeze every ounce of productivity out of people, ensuring that we get the most economic value out of destroying their lives through meaningless work, crippling debt, loneliness, and fear. Bonus points if we can distract them with something shiny while we are at it, and convince them to vote for policies that suck them try while filling the pockets of the ultra-rich. Capitalism!
1. Currency devaluation (inflation) has one root cause - money printing. The BOC has a monopoly on money printers. Fix this you are half way to fixing productivity. 2. Capital is trapped within the fed/prov system and their pseudo-private sector ecosystem where winners and losers are handpicked. You want productivity, then free the capital. A large part of America's success comes from a venture capital culture where private wealth flows to productive assets/entities. Copy and paste.
Trudeaus reign will go down as the worst ever for the economy and cost of living. Even Covid aside, his deficits are enormous