Canada has experienced some economic growth since coming out of COVID, but our pace of growth and productivity is nothing to write home about.
J.P. Gervais, chief economist for Farm Credit Canada, says that there is always low hanging fruit when it comes to improving productivity, such as adding efficiency, economies of scale, and producing more with less. But the real work to improve Canada’s productivity will take more scale, more innovation, and integration of technology.
Canada’s regulatory environment requires some tweaks too, Gervais says, as red tape and regulatory hurdles work against us and our competitiveness on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ranking. Gervais says that Canada also needs to focus on both upstream and downstream development, including more value-add projects.
In the face of uncertain trade with the U.S., he adds that we can’t ignore the U.S. market just due to its size and proximity, but we have to work to serve other markets. That said, market diversification is easy to say, but very hard to implement and Canada will have to address its logistics bottlenecks in order to serve new or different markets.
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