How Not to Build a Country: Canada’s Late Soviet Pessimism(2019)

How Not to Build a Country: Canada’s Late Soviet Pessimism(2019)(palladiummag.com)

49 points by smehtaca 5 years ago | 15 comments

slashdot2008 5 years ago |

As an electrical engineer in the vancouver area this article rung true to me. It is too bad Canada's hi tech industry died with nortel, RIM, corel. Bombardier's aerospace division is the latest casualty. I didn't realize the cancellation of the avro arrow was the beginning of the end for tech in Canada. What do we do other than resources and real estate?

vinger 5 years ago | |

Those companies are usually listed on the nasdaq like shopify.

The whole hardware hi tech industry has moved to China. The Avro wasn't going to change this. It is not like building planes is a great business either currently.

osigurdson 5 years ago | | |

Shopify is larger than Royal Bank by market cap. Kudos to them.

goatinaboat 5 years ago | |

I didn't realize the cancellation of the avro arrow was the beginning of the end

See also the cancellations of TSR2 and Black Arrow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow#Cancellation

“Prior to the cancellation of Black Arrow, NASA had offered to launch British payloads for free; however, this offer was withdrawn following the decision to cancel Black Arrow”

slashdot2008 5 years ago | |

answering my own question: the 100 largest companies in canada [0], banking, insurance, oil and gas, and the telecommunications provider oligopoly fill out the top 13 and then we get the odd retail, railroad, auto parts, mining player in the mix.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_C...

info781 5 years ago |

Resource extraction industries in Canada will always take a bulk of the engineering talent, that is where the money is. Venture capital for mining is well established in Canada. As for real estate, everyone uses floating mortgages, so prices will stay high until interest rates go up. Salaries in Canada are structured differently. Because taxes on income over $80,000 a year are very high, deferred compensation such as pensions and real estate gains are more important. Barter or cash jobs are another important source of income. Americans would never tolerate the rationing that Canadians go through for health care.

bawolff 5 years ago |

I didn't find this particularly convincing. The examples seem to be that government intervention in (consumer) healthcare and agriculture causes stagnation, with the implication that this extends to other industries.

But healthcare & agriculture are unique industries that are regulated very differently than other industries in canada. I don't expect these industries to be cut throat. I'd rather have stability in those sectors and leave the innovation to other sectors. Regardless of your view on that point though, i fail to see how the example generalizes.

mola 5 years ago |

Qualify of life is pretty high there, right? Are there many poor people? Do median people have access to good education and healthcare?

They don't produce new billionaires via cutthroat competition, so?

Please let me live in that sort of "late soviet pessimism", safety, stability, work, leisure. Oh the horrors.

killtimeatwork 5 years ago | |

The gist of the article is that things are not bad, but have been in slow but steady decline for some time now. This brings a lot of discontentment, because people psychologically can care more about first derivative that the actual value of their quality of life - i.e. a poor guy who just got a job which pays median wage can be happier than a billionaire who just lost $100m.

hntrader 5 years ago | | |

> first derivative

At the risk of being pedantic; people care about both the first and second derivative. After a while, people get dissatisfied if the second derivative is <= 0, because that implies that the rate is decreasing. People also care about relative differences with their peers.

bawolff 5 years ago | | |

With the implication it wouldn't be that way if canada was more like the usa. But aren't americans constantly complaining about stagnant wages (for low and middle class) and generally shrinking middle class?

curation 5 years ago | |

It is. The cultural difference between Canadians and Americans is we worry about that difference, are taught to in school. The economic difference is we have healthcare, so don't fear getting sick in the same register of horror.

redis_mlc 5 years ago |

I don't understand the Brezhnev analogies (first I've seen that metaphor applied to Canada), but this matches my experience:

"Many startups and tech companies I know are having a hard time hiring developers, especially with Amazon moving in. Their salaries are way too low. On a few occasions, I’ve gotten to ask if they’d consider raising compensation, but I get the same reply every time: “This is how much a developer should make. We’re not paying a penny more.”

Luckily, Canada will be one of the biggest winners of global warming. Most of their land mass is not arable today, but it will be tomorrow.