Go north, young man, go north
Unless
the Winter Olympics are on television or someone is clubbing baby seals, Americans don't pay much attention to what's happening in
Canada. It's as if we live in a house with a set of quiet, orderly neighbors on one side and a bachelor pad with drunken parties, girls in the hot tub and occasional gunshot eruptions on the other. To whom would you pay more attention?
I dare say Americans could correctly name the president of
Mexico (Filipe Calderon) over the prime minister of
Canada (
Stephen Harper) by a margin of 5-to-1. That's too bad. While we have every reason to fear the disorder spilling over from our increasingly lawless neighbor to the south, our well-mannered Canadian neighbors have pulled their act together. We could learn a lot from them.
Look what's not happening in
Canada. There is no real estate crisis. There is no banking crisis. There is no unemployment crisis. There is no sovereign debt crisis. Recent reports suggest that consumers are loading up too much debt, but
Canada shares that problem with nearly every other country in the industrialized world.
Among the Group of Seven nations, which also include the
United States,
France,
Japan,
Germany, the
United Kingdom and
Italy,
Canada's economic activity has come the closest to returning to the pre-recession peak. The country has recovered three-quarters of all jobs it lost. The
International Monetary Fund estimates that
Canada will be the only country among the
G-7 to have achieved a balanced budget by 2015.
Read the full article
here.