The best place on earth

Let’s not sugarcoat it—it’s been a bad, bad year. Plunging markets have siphoned an estimated $300 billion out of the pensions and retirement savings of Canadians. A huge wave of job losses—400,000 and counting—has pushed the unemployment rate to an 11-year high. Add in the billions spent on corporate bailouts, and the $100 billion-plus in projected federal and provincial deficits predicted for the coming years, and the economic gloom can seem overwhelming.

But Canadians might want to stop and take a deep breath before googling up the local chapter of the Hemlock Society. As we gather at the cottage, beach or in the backyard to celebrate our nation’s 142nd birthday, there is much to be thankful for. Things beyond the usual July 1 paeans to our scenic wonders, abundant natural resources, diversity, and stable politics.

For our Canada Day special issue, Maclean’s scoured international opinion surveys, census statistics, think tank reports, policy papers and consumer databases to uncover the truth about this country’s place in the global order. The results may surprise you: we’re wealthier than the Americans, we live longer than the Swedes, we’re more industrious than the Germans, we have more lovers than the Italians, we eat better than the French and we have more TVs than the Japanese.

In so many areas—the economy, health, education, public safety, and living standards—the numbers, it seems, back up what we’ve always quietly believed deep in our patriotic hearts. Sorry to brag, but it looks like Canada is the best place on earth.

Measuring prosperity can be a tricky business. By the International Monetary Fund’s reckoning, the oil-rich emirate of Qatar is actually the world’s richest nation, with a per-capita gross domestic product of US$85,200. The World Bank, using a different formula, puts Luxembourg at the top of the heap, with a per-capita gross national income of US$61,860. And neither number tells you much about how all that wealth is divided.

Since 1990, the United Nations has followed a different tack, publishing an annual human development index that crunches data about life expectancy, purchasing power, literacy and education levels to rank countries by their citizens’ broader “well-being.” In the latest list, released last December, Canada placed third, ahead of Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Switzerland and, well, the rest of the world. The United States was 15th. Only Norway and Iceland scored higher, although it’s a safe assumption that the collapse of Iceland’s banking system has since ended the island nation’s reign (despite what you might think, the UN gives no extra points for Björk).

Even by the narrower measurements of wealth alone, Canada is looking surprisingly robust these days. If you go by household net worth, the typical Canadian family is actually doing better than the typical family in America. After adjusting for currency and purchasing power, the median Canadian household has a net worth of US$122,260, versus US$93,100 in the States. Americans also carry almost twice the per-capita personal debt—US$40,250 versus US$23,460. And we spend just 19 per cent of our annual household budgets on shelter, a category that accounts for 34 per cent of theirs.

Even if you crunch the numbers differently—and look at all the bank deposits, stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other financial assets in the country divided by the number of households—Canada still does surprisingly well on the global scale. According to Haver Analytics, as of late 2008, Canada ranks No. 2 among the top industrialized countries in the world, with a financial net worth per household of US$154,100, trailing only the U.S., which clocks in at US$245,700. We’re substantially ahead of Britain, France and Germany. And the good news in all the current bad news is that the global economic downturn is narrowing the gap between us and our southern neighbours. Since late 2007, their financial net worth has dropped by a staggering 24 per cent, while ours has dropped by 17 per cent.

Canadians also boast higher median household incomes than the Aussies and the Brits, and a higher level of home ownership than the Americans, Japanese, Swedes, Danes, French and Germans. And we live in spacious comfort—77 per cent of our homes have five or more rooms, compared to 74 per cent in the U.S., 72 per cent in Britain, and 70 per cent in Australia. (Not that we’re hung up on that stuff: when National Geographic asked whether owning a big house was an important goal in a global 2009 survey, just seven per cent of Canadian consumers agreed, compared to 14 per cent of Germans, and 22 per cent of the French.)

The Great Recession has undeniably made us poorer as a nation, but with the indicators suggesting we may have finally sounded bottom, Canada does seem better positioned than most for a recovery. As our politicians never tire of pointing out, our financial sector has come through the banking crisis relatively unscathed, and property markets, while down, aren’t in free-fall like they are south of the border, where house prices have dropped by 32 per cent from their 2006 peak, or Britain, where prices have dropped by 20 per cent from their 2007 high. In fact, a recent Goldman Sachs report predicts that Canada, along with Australia and Britain, will be among the first advanced economies to emerge from the recession, returning to trend rates of growth by early 2011, and raising outputs back up to capacity by sometime between 2013 and 2015. The U.S., on the other hand, isn’t expected to get its output back up to capacity until 2017. “I think we still have this inferiority complex,” says Benjamin Tal, senior economist at CIBC World Markets. “But we ought to start feeling better about ourselves. This crisis has really exposed the vulnerabilities of the U.S. economy.”