Western Standard - October 05, 2026


Canada's Productivity Collapse ｜ Relying on US Generosity

Mentioned
Trump
MARTY UP NORTH： Is Danielle Smith betting Alberta’s future on Carney’s promises？ Cory Morgan： No, America isn’t going to steal Canada’s water

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

177.21

Word count

379

Sentence count

17

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Investment was the next thing that per one investment in 19, 2007, actually, for every
00:00:06.180 dollar that the Americans invested in their productivity, Canada invested 90 cents.
00:00:11.520 By 2024, for every dollar Americans invested in productivity, Canada invests 54 cents.
00:00:17.780 We're not even investing in productivity anymore.
00:00:19.660 We're not even investing.
00:00:20.700 We're falling back onto this moral superiority myth.
00:00:25.740 And that's also why we succumb to politicians that wanted to do virtue signaling and wanted to say, well, we're going to save the world for because of our environmental 0.7%. It was all virtue signaling because of our myth of superiority. And so that's where what made us better has actually also made us weaker.
00:00:46.820 So, though, one of the arguments that has been being like, I know Trump has made this
00:00:52.220 argument or various American officials have made this argument that maybe not in these
00:00:56.560 words, but did Canada just like we must have been to have invested this little in our own
00:01:01.740 economy and our own productivity, we must have been relying on someone.
00:01:05.240 And it seems like maybe we've been relying on the United States.
00:01:08.000 Is that the case?
00:01:09.080 Absolutely.
00:01:09.620 That's the case for sure.
00:01:10.680 We made the mistake of believing that the United States was going to eternally be the
00:01:16.040 nation that it was after world war ii where they did the marshall plan saved europe they're very
00:01:20.180 generous nation and we as we relied on that generosity and let our own guard down and so we 0.90
00:01:26.040 did a bunch of stupid things that quite frankly they can't get rid of now there's an there's a 0.91
00:01:31.380 real irony there because it seems like even though we as canadians and the pew research showed this 1.00
00:01:37.540 would call the americans arrogant it seems like we've been arrogant about our moral superiority
00:01:43.960 You are exactly right. And it is bringing us down. And it has put us in this position. So instead of having a reasonable approach to our moral principles, and our principle based society, but understanding that we still have to provide economically, but those were all our mistakes, and we are going to pay for them, we will be paying for them in the price that we have to pay to disengage our economy.