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By More roads (anonymous) | Posted April 02, 2010 at 00:39:40
A sign of the times, Stephen Harper and his Conservative party have been in power since since Feb 6, 2006. Since that time, real GDP has grown from $1,247,807,000 to $1,286,431,000, or around 0.765% per year...
http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/econ05-eng.htm
Not only that, but we have gone from having big surpluses to big deficits.
Even if you include the just the first two years of his term, real GDP only averaged 2.69% per year, hardly anything to be proud of. As for Canada being an economic powerhouse, that's only if your yardstick are the other slow growing G-7 economies.
If Canada doesn't smarten up and start building our productive resources, it might not be too long until China is calling the shots. These people are serious about economic growth, have little respect for human rights and are quickly developing the military capacity to take what they want, i.e. water, resources, agricultural land, etc.
Meanwhile back in North America, we are spending most of our money on social benefits, which do little to nothing to build productive capacity and will ultimately limit our ability to fend off potential military threats. Much like nature, it will be the strong who survive and as long as we allow ourselves to become weak and spoiled, we may soon be speaking Chinese and taking orders from the Communist Party.
The big difference between China and G-7 nations is that it is serious about building power. It retains ownership stakes in many of China's biggest companies...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Central-owned_enterprise_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China
...and one has to believe that it has it's eyes on more than just China. It is already in Africa and there is no reason to think it won't be in South America next. Considering that it has 1.3 billion people and is growing at around 8-10% per year, it won't be long before it's GDP is bigger than the U.S..
As long as Stephen Harper and leaders like him believe that low taxes, high deficits and generous social programs are the way to economic strength, we will continue marching along the path to our own demise. Guess what, in life you get what you pay for. If we aren't willing to get serious about growing our economy, but would rather continue to have free health care and education and old age benefits, there may be a day when we aren't the people calling the shots.
In my opinion, that would be very bad.
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