EDITORIAL: Throne speech rhetoric vs. reality

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King Charles gave a predictably inspiring speech from the throne on Tuesday — because Prime Minister Mark Carney’s advisors wrote most of it — but inspiration will mean little unless the Liberals can address Canada’s long-standing problem of slow economic growth.

That reality flies in the face of what the throne speech described as the Liberal government’s “overarching goal — its core mission … to build the strongest economy in the G7”, meaning Canada, the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Japan.

The problem, identified by everyone from the Bank of Canada, to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, to former Liberal finance minister Chrystia Freeland, who described it as the “Achilles’ heel” of the Canadian economy in her 2022 budget, is low productivity.

Low productivity means Canadian workers are not being given access to the latest economic tools and technological advancements needed to work more efficiently, because of a lack of business investment in Canada.

Freeland herself said that matters because national productivity, “is what guarantees the dream of every parent – that our children will be more prosperous than we are” – a dream dying today.

That’s led to Canada’s real GDP per capita, which measures economic output per person adjusted for inflation and is a widely accepted metric of a nation’s standard of living, to fall below the average of the world’s developed countries.

It’s also approaching 50% below that of the U.S., our largest trading partner.

If nothing changes, the OECD has predicted Canada will have the slowest economic growth rate among developed countries from 2020 to 2060.

During their nearly decade in power from 2015 to 2025, Justin Trudeau’s government recorded the slowest rate of economic growth of any federal government since that of R. B. Bennett during the Great Depression.

Carney is promising to turn that around by removing interprovincial trade barriers, slashing the time it takes to approve major infrastructure projects, make Canada a conventional and green energy superpower and double the rate of home building.

All of this while redefining Canada’s economic relationship with the U.S. during a tariff and trade war and simultaneously expanding Canada’s reach into global markets.

So far, all of this is just rhetoric. Carney needs to show he can turn it into reality.