I know! I feel like a wimp living here myself - only a couple of weeks of -30 each year, hardly any snow, and chinooks galore. I hardly break out my winter parka here.
Sam, I don’t disagree with anything in your post, but all of Canada can’t live in Alberta (well, they probably could, but it wouldn’t be pretty). What’s the solution for keeping people where they are, and getting their local economies going?
I read an article in The Economist sometime recently describing how Japan, despite I think it was 12 major stimulus “injections”, not being able to get out of its slump.
We Canadians shouldn’t feel too much relative to other less supposedly frugal nations - this article in The Economist makes the argument that Japanese and Germans did not “succumb to the boom’s vices, but are nevertheless facing nasty recessions”.
Yes, but the reason for it is that both of those countries have tied significant portions of their economies to making goods for other countries - they are primary exporters of durable goods. So when their customers face a downturn, so do they.
The whole point to the article was was that large structural imbalances are unhealthy - either having too much consumer spending, driving your economy on borrowed money, or relying too much on the consumer spending of others - driving your economy on supplying the consumer spending of others. What you want is a current account in balance. If your current account is heavily in surplus or in debt, you’re exposing your country to additional risk.