I have been intrigued by that thought since reading “Canada is Poor,” an essay by Dominic Pino in National Review. Drawing on research by the Fraser Institute, a well-known Canadian think tank, his essay spotlights a remarkable finding: Median earnings are lower in every Canadian province than they are in any American state.
”In a ranking of the 50 US states and 10 Canadian provinces by median earnings per person, all 10 provinces line up at the bottom, occupying spots 51–60,” Pino writes. “Every US state has higher median earnings per person than Alberta, the richest Canadian province.”
The Fraser researchers calculated earnings (expressed in 2017 Canadian dollars) for each jurisdiction. They included income paid to workers in the public and private sectors, plus the self-employed, but excluded nonwage income such as dividends and capital gains. By that yardstick, the Canadian earnings picture a decade and a half ago was at least somewhat competitive. Though most provinces were still clustered at the bottom, at least one state (Idaho) was underperforming Ontario and Saskatchewan, and Alberta — Canada’s richest province — was wealthier than all but 12 states.
But from 2010 to 2022, Canadian incomes fell even more decisively behind those in America. Alberta is still the wealthiest province in Canada, but its median earnings are now lower than those in even the poorest US state. When Fraser looked at the relationship between states and the provinces they most closely resembled, it found that the gap had widened in the Americans’ favor in every case.
For example, Saskatchewan’s median income trailed that in next-door North Dakota by $6,795 in 2010, but by 2022 the gap had expanded to $15,511. While British Columbia has enjoyed healthy economic growth, the province nevertheless lost ground relative to Washington state, its closest neighbor. Even more dramatic is Michigan’s lead over Ontario. In 2010, Michigan workers out-earned Ontarians by $2,955 per person; by 2022, that earnings differential had surged to $8,661. (Again, all incomes are expressed in 2017 Canadian dollars.)
As Pino points out, in 2014 Canada was widely characterized as having supplanted the United States as the country in which to achieve middle-class success.
Thus in The New York Times that year, David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy reported that “after-tax middle-class incomes in Canada … now appear to be higher than in the United States.” In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson asked “How Did Canada’s Middle Class Get So Rich?” The Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves and Pete Rodrigue suggested that the American Dream may have moved to Canada, while an article in Salon by Edward McClelland purported to explain “the decay of the American dream” in a piece headlined “America’s middle-class defeat: How Canada shamed the wealthiest nation on earth.” And The Guardian’s Suzanne McGee set out to explain “How America’s middle class fell behind its Canadian neighbors.”
But 2014, it soon became clear, was an anomaly. The American Dream had not moved north of the border. For all that US policymakers have gotten wrong, they haven’t derailed the mighty US economy. It is true that the United States and Canada are sister societies and that their economies are closely entwined. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars in goods and services cross the border. Nevertheless, on a per-capita basis America remains vastly more economically productive than Canada (or, for that matter, Western Europe and Japan).
So maybe it’s no mystery why rich celebrities have stopped threatening to move to Canada if Trump wins. His politics and persona may hold no more appeal for them than the first time he was on the ballot. But the thought of relocating to Canada, a country now poorer than Alabama, holds even less.
This is an excerpt from Arguable, a Globe Opinion newsletter by columnist Jeff Jacoby. Sign up to get Arguable in your inbox each week.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby.
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Publish date : 2024-10-22 02:59:00
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