The Canadian Press
June 30, 2008 - 7:47 a.m.
OTTAWA - High commodity prices are covering up Canada’s transgression socio-economic performance relative to other advanced countries, the Conference Board of Canada says.
“We appear to be riding high directly to global demand for our resources, but this is not a sustainable course for our country,” the think-tank’s president, Anne Golden, stated Monday.
Citing a “ill success to innovate,” Golden uttered Canada is losing ground to other countries that better exploit their own advantages.
“Unfortunately, the Conference Board has been telling this story for a twelve years, and the same issues have emerged year after year.”
The Conference Board’s comparison of 17 well-off countries finds Canada in the basis half of the group in five of the six performance aspects the reflection assessed.
Canada’s 11th-place overall economic ranking is a significant gradual wasting from its third-place position in the 1970s, by the strongest drag coming from a 15th-place productivity performance.
According to the Conference Board, Canada ranks 13th in innovation as “research is not successfully commercialized.”
On the bright side, Canada is rated No. 2 in education and skills, behind Finland. Canada earns top marks with a view to high-school and college completion rates, except still “four in 10 Canadian workers lack the basic literacy skills to cope with the demands of work in the modern economy,” and “Canada does not produce sufficiency graduates in fields that underpin innovation like as knowledge, math and engineering.”
In environmental stewardship, Canada ranks 15th out of 17, “with poor performances in greenhouse gas emissions, smog and waste generation,” the Conference Board says.
“Canadians generate more waste per person than any other country in the comparison.”
Canada earns a middle-of-the-pack ninth-place rating concerning the health of its population, and “with soaring child diabetes and obesity rates, this may be the first generation of children in more than a century to have worse health outcomes than their parents.”
And in conditions of general social stability, Canada rates 10th, and “some of Canada’s results - such as rates of house-breaking and assault, and levels of child poverty - are shockingly poor.”