CANADA’S CURRENT CHALLENGES AND DILEMMAS AND WHY CANADA IS STRUGGLING TO COPE WITH THEM?

Canada, a G-7 country, has had a good run – generally – in terms of progress and prosperity over the last four to five decades. Canada can be proud of the AAA rating of its economy, consistent ranking in top five or six in terms of best country to live in, happiest country, best cities and so on. Canada performed the best, amongst G-7 countries, during the recession of 2008 and subsequent years. All in all, quite a solid performance!

                

However, of late Canada is finding itself to be struggling to meet current major challenges and dilemmas. What are these major challenges and dilemmas? These could be summarized under the following buckets:

·       Economic

·       Political

·       Societal

·       Other

The main reasons Canada is struggling to cope with them can be distilled down to following:

-      Apparent conceit (misplaced and silly, of course) on the part of the members of the majority community of Canadians, who are in the decision making positions, that they know best, and their stubborn unwillingness to learn from others (other races, other countries)

-      Political expediency, and

-      Tardiness (including benign slothfulness of the populace psyche).

We would return to the effect of how these factors are negatively impacting Canada’s interests; however, let’s first look at the listing of challenges/dilemmas under the above four categories:

Economic: Canada is on way to balance its books – the present government is quite confident that it will present a surplus budget in 2015. On the surface things may appear to be quite hunky dory but when you dig deeper you would find some issues – issues that have the potential to cause deleterious effect of varying degree over the long run. These are:

-      Exports in general failing to pick up to the extent it was expected to (uneven performance)

-      Commodities’ export struggling (lack of outlets, lack of new market, drop in international demand)

-      Employment numbers moving more like stock exchange indices rather than in a predictable manner with decline in (quality) full-time jobs

-      Too much fiscal conservatism of Conservatives (which is proving more counter-productive than helpful)

-      Putting all eggs in one basket (too much dependence on US)

-      Over-dependence on consumption numbers of China’s economy and/or investment flowing from China to Canada (this brings in its wake concerns and apprehensions)

-      Sustainability of welfare schemes in its present form (due to changing demographics and consequent changes in revenues etc)

Political:

-      Party ideologies swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other (from very conservative/free market ideology to liberalism to confused egalitarianism)

-      Failure among Federal parties to align on where Canada’s interests actually lie

-      Ottawa and some Provinces failing to align on where Canada’s interests actually lie (misalignment on national priorities, action plans etc)

-      Unnecessary spats between Executive and Judiciary and supposedly autonomous bodies, like, Federal Election Office etc

-      Misalignment with prevailing leadership of USA (the President, its various Secretaries)

-      Lack of well thought out strategies vis-à-vis different global regions, countries, issues [often strategies appearing to be getting modified based on ideology (and interests) of party in power in Ottawa and/or Provinces rather than furthering Canadian interests]

-      Threat of radicalism (and the measures required to deal with them)

-      Not so competent politicians (e.g. ostensible lack of understanding of fundamentals of Canadian economy, lack of grasp of issues staring in the face and so on)

Societal:

-      Changes in age demographics (increasing geriatric component of the population which brings different set of challenges for the society)

-      Changes in population structure (growth of certain ethnic groups which could cause serious issues down the road)

-      Widening gap between the rich and the poor

-      Declining standards of welfare schemes, services (including pension plans, health care etc because of funds failing to keep pace with the demand)

-      Increasing liberalism on various issues like LGBT and questions/scenarios they are raising/creating

-      Atomicity of familial structures, changes in family concept

-      Activism carried out by different interest groups

-      Explosion of social media

Other:

-      Increasing income gap between rich and poor

-      Decline in the corporate leadership competence

-      Absence of deep pocketed Canadian investors

-      Global issues like climate aberrations (aka climate change)

It would be naive to expect that idealistic situation would prevail in Canada and there would be perfect harmony and alignment among political parties of all stripes – at Federal and Provincial levels – and all the issues would get sorted out nicely and smoothly, that there would be competent people at the right places at the right time and so on.  

But the reality is something else: there are some basic factors that seem to be exacerbating the situation. These could be traced to be stemming from three items listed at the beginning of this narrative. How these factors are negatively impacting Canada currently and can impact in future will be dealt with in a separate blog. Stay tuned!