Canada has become the Toronto Maple Leafs

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They were supposed to be outstanding – on paper. In the real world, they’re closer to the upper end of mediocre. So much promise, never realized. Reputation is way up here; results are somewhere down there.

I’m talking about the Toronto Maple Leafs. I’m also talking about Canada.

The Leafs can at least say they’re in a league with a salary cap and a player draft, both designed to ensure no team is head and shoulders above the others. What’s Canada’s excuse?

Our country was gifted a lifetime of first-round draft choices, starting with the world’s second-largest land mass, a bounty of natural resources, an educated population, three vast oceans separating us from a world of threats, and fortuitous adjacency to the planet’s biggest and most dynamic economy. We have a rare and happy history of peace and co-operation through stable and respected institutions.

To borrow a metaphor from another sport, Canada wakes up every day on third base, with no outs and no strikes. And yet we’re having trouble bringing it home.

Start with the economy. Productivity and growth have been struggling for some time. After the drop in oil and gas investment that began in 2015, the problem grew worse. A recent Statistics Canada study says that, since the pandemic, Canada’s per capita gross domestic product is 7 per cent below its long-term trend – a decline of about $4,200 in output per person.

Part of the story is a lack of business investment, an issue Canadian governments have long struggled to understand, let alone change. The other factor was a barely supervised, unprecedented immigration boom – encouraged by a federal government unable to do basic arithmetic.

Another result of the failure to count: Canada’s more-unaffordable-than-ever housing market. According to National Bank, the annual income needed to purchase the median home in Toronto is $254,000. In Vancouver: $274,000.

As I wrote in a recent column, the housing promises in last month’s federal budget will not change things anytime soon. Funnelling trillions of extra dollars into residential real estate, in a country already seriously overinvested in housing at the expense of business investment, may set the stage for our productivity growth to go from anemic to worse.

Or consider health care. We used to think ours was the world’s best. Maybe it was. Today? Things are so far from optimal that, though it’s clear a big share of Canadians don’t have a family doctor – somewhere between 14 per cent and 22 per cent, with some provinces clocking in at more than 30 per cent – the actual number is unknown.

In 2016, the Commonwealth Fund’s study of 11 highly developed countries found that 46 per cent of Canadians reported being able to get a same-day appointment with a doctor or nurse. By last year, that had fallen to just 26 per cent, putting Canada in last place.

It’s a crisis, in response to which provincial governments are somewhere between complacent and paralyzed.

In Commonwealth’s most recent ranking of health care, Canada finished second-to-last out of 11 countries. Leading European countries, such as No. 1 Norway, offer more coverage, including things such as drug and dental, and better care, for fewer public and private dollars.

Speaking of Norway, it’s basically a better-managed Canada – both an environmental gold medalist and a major exporter of fossil fuels. It has high carbon taxes – a litre of gasoline is currently around $3 – and leads the world in electric-vehicle uptake. It is also happily expanding its natural gas industry. When Germany came to Canada begging for help to replace gas from Russia, the Trudeau government looked at its shoes and changed the subject. The Norwegians? They pumped more gas.

Norway has also been responsible to future generations of its citizens, by consistently setting aside part of its non-renewable resource revenues. The country’s sovereign wealth fund is now worth more than $2-trillion.

Canada’s list of stuff that doesn’t quite work is long. Ottawa has more public servants than ever, yet often seems unable to do basic things. Criminal courts throw out serious charges because of a lack of judges. In Ontario, landlords are at the mercy of bad tenants, and good tenants are at the mercy of bad landlords, because the system for enforcing the law is broken.

The land of peace, order and good government has become notably deficient in the supply of that last item. It was not always thus. Canada promised American economic dynamism with Europe’s public services and social safety net. The best of both worlds. We have instead drifted into an unhappy state of second-best on all counts.