To many voters, election campaigns seem like a toxic brew – one part popularity contest, two parts mud-slinging match.
But we dismiss elections at our peril in Atlantic Canada, where voters in three of the region’s four provinces will go to the polls within a year. (PEI gets a pass, for now.) A federal campaign is also a certainty by October 2025.
The crew at CrowsNest believes voters should approach the upcoming elections with a sense of high purpose – and hold political feet to the fire over the region’s challenges, starting with its competitive economic position.
Canadians often look southward and reach the comfortable conclusion that the US is worse off than their own country, but that’s only half-true.
The US is besting Canada in key areas, starting with the national economy, which is outperforming Canada’s in dramatic fashion. Ditto for its record on innovation, productivity, and the environment.
Indeed, RBC says Canada’s productivity ranking among competitive advanced economies has fallen steadily since 1970. Today, “Canada is 30% less productive than the U.S. and closer to lower-income states like Alabama in terms of economic performance than tech-rich California or New York,” the RBC said in a report released in June.
Back home in Atlantic Canada, even Alabama’s GDP per capita number looks pretty good – better than ours, overall.
In upcoming provincial campaigns in this region, party leaders will announce new spending for health care, education, and that perennial favourite – better roads.
Atlantic Canadians should insist that political candidates also tell voters how they’re going to create an economy strong enough to compete internationally and support those programs on a continuous basis.
This won’t be easy.
Provincial debts across Canada have been increasing steadily to support rising health care costs, and the Parliamentary Budget Officer says the level of spending in three of the region’s four provinces (the exception is Nova Scotia) is unsustainable. That means public debt is growing faster than the economy.
Today, Atlantic Canada is poised for either economic retrenchment or transformative change – change buoyed by strong if cyclical resource sectors, a growing tech industry, strength in biosciences, a lifestyle premium, and a growing population.
In the coming round of elections, political candidates should tell us how they will take us to a better future, while paying the freight costs for getting us there. It’s time to get serious about the ballot box.
-30-