Country Matters: Canada

Economic Growth Dept: How we measure our success as a country matters. It tells us a lot about what we value most. It shapes what we ask of our politicians and how we judge the performance of our governments. It shapes politics and policy, according to The Star. Our focus on GDP in media and politics reflects what has been for several decades now a preoccupation with economic growth, a preoccupation that helps explain the tiresome whining of some of our opinion leaders about how badly we were lagging the U.S. even while we were doing pretty well on other counts. It probably also explains the equally irritating self-righteousness when we now lecture our allies on how they should manage their economies. But GDP tells us nothing about how the benefits of growth are shared or about the costs of growth to the environment, our community, even future economic prospects. It tells us nothing about those values that sit outside the market and as we enter 2013, how is Canada doing? How do we stack up against other rich countries? Emerging from the year of the 50th anniversary of medicare, the 30th anniversary of the Charter, are we making progress? Do we even have any shared notion of what progress would look like? Very often international comparisons of how well a country is doing rely on GDP and this has been the go-to measure in Canada as well. GDP measures the total value of the goods and services produced by a country and is the best way to track the size and growth of the economy. On this basis, in a world shaken by U.S. debt, European fragility and the emergence of new economic super powers, we have been doing pretty well. Of course, GDP is important and especially to developing countries trying to lift their populations out of poverty. But it is a lousy measure of the health and welfare of a country such as ours. As countries get richer, growth brings diminishing returns and other things become more important. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.