You absolutely are missing the point.

It doesn’t matter what we’d like it to be.

Claiming a statistical account measures chickens when it measures albatrosses and then making inferences about chickens, would be silly.

Likewise, using labour productivity figures from the national income accounts.

Nothing to say that the points you and others are raising aren’t both much more relevant and interesting.

But when the business press drags out labour productivity comparisons as if they have anything meaningful to say on the subject, it’s a non sequitur to the conversation you’d really like to have.

Whatever the problems with the old definitions, and they are numerous, they remain the way the national accounts are published in OECD countries.

But so are too the conventions of generally accepted accounting principles for financial accounting.

These are the way our data sources are framed so to do meaningful data analysis and interpretation we have to know them.

Business schools are not immune or exempt from understanding where the data comes from and how it’s constructed. Any good business school in whatever tradition will make sure its students understand that at least.

It’s one thing be such a pedant as to make students switch from conventional and do basic microeconomics with the P and Q axes reversed (as they logically should be), just to correct a deeply embedded error in the history of economic practice - and there are profs out there who do that.

It’s another thing to be insistent on what is actually in a measure that calls itself ‘labour productivity’ and is used by uninformed or deliberately misleading business press in Canada to beat on the labour force itself when the structural issues are completely different.

It would be worth discussing if the business press didn’t constantly misinterpret the meaning of measure.

Fair enough.

There are genuine questions about whether or not the federal government should have given in to the provinces and territories in the 1990s regarding vocational and labour market training.

Both of these, and post secondary, are federal jurisdiction or shared jurisdiction at best. (But accreditation of professional associations and credentials is provincial.)

The federal government did its best to continue to directly fund these kinds of programs but the provinces, especially but not exclusively Quebec, felt strongly that this was preventing them to set their own socioeconomic development priorities.

It sounds like both the CPC and LPC federal parties had platforms that look to have the federal government step back into this space.

One has to wonder if they view the agreements they made to transfer labour market training to the provinces and territories as something they can pull back or wind up…

On the agriculture point, let’s say I am more than qualified to speak to economic terminology.

So, it may be pedantic, but it’s important to understand where economics definitions come from.

Some like labour productivity and economic rents are irrevocably tied to their origins in agricultural economic concepts.

Which means that when applied to a manufacturing or service economy, peoples’ intuition about their meaning can be very wrong.

When we’re teaching economics, we talk about ‘developing economic intuition’ but it would be much easier for students if we didn’t have to counter so many counterintuitive terms.

I was absolutely dumbfounded at the time.

There was so much revealing racism and more in that statement, but also American Exceptionalism and willingness to do anything to get a gold medal.

Agricultural productivity is relevant insomuch as the economic definition of ‘labour productivity’ was developed for that context.

It’s a measure of return of labour to capital.

It is NOT measure of how productive the human capital of a population is.

You and others here are mistakenly confusing human capital which includes investments in

• education
• skills
• health and longevity

with labour productivity.

Also, you are very far off the mark if you think that Canada’s education and skills training is in any way inferior to that of the United States. On every possible measure from literacy to cognitive skills and abilities, the Canadian adult population is better than the US in international comparisons such as by the OECD.

Skilled trades programs are arguably better in Europe but not in the USA.

Two thoughts.

Most Canadians view changing your administration as a collective responsibility of all US citizens. Kind thoughts are appreciated but most of us are increasingly impatient.

Second, have you considered that, like many other Americans, you may be a Canadian by descent? And if so, any children you may have also?

At present, due to a 2023 Superior Court Bjorkquist decision on Lost Canadians in Ontario (unchallenged by the federal government), there is an exceptional situation where people born outside Canada who are descendants of people born in Canada can apply to claim citizenship.

See this page - the flag at the top gives the latest extension of the interim provisions (that override the existing law that the Court stayed).

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/canadian-citizenship/become-canadian-citizen/eligibility/already-citizen.html

While I wouldn’t normally direct anyone to Reddit, the CanadianCitizenship subreddit has a lot of information on people’s experiences in navigating the process.

See the FAQ at https://www.reddit.com/r/Canadiancitizenship/s/rHN4JVQwQO

We need to let go of the rule of thumb that Canada is 1/10th the US in population.

It’s not just a nitpick to say that’s off now.

Canada has had a more rapidly growing population such that it’s been 1/9th that of the United States for most of a decade.

A quick calculation on current population estimates puts it as 347.5 / 41.5 million = ~ 8.4.

That said, Canada still has more manufacturing jobs per capita even with the correction.

I appreciate that you recognize that so-called ‘labour productivity’* is primarily a measure of the quality and technological level of the capital that the labour is working with.

Too often, comparative measures of labour productivity and discussion focuses on hours worked, vacation days etc.

These are very much second-order.

Education levels are not second-order but Canadian workers are more literate and better educated across the board than the US manufacturing workers.

So, the real question in manufacturing (as it is in housing construction), “Why is the Canadian private sector so unwilling to invest in ongoing technological upgrading let alone innovation?”

• ‘Labour productivity’ was originally a measure of how much a given number of workers could produce with a fixed piece of land. Crop improvements and technology increased that in the agricultural revolution.

This really is a great piece.

Interesting first-person perspective on Carney as a fellow graduate student at Oxford.

But it was the latter half of the piece, that reflects on how Canadians who study in the UK or US are constantly subjected to overly aggressive declarations that deny Canada as a nation, which really hit home for me.

As a Canadian who attended graduate school in the US, I experienced almost verbatim every denial and put down in this piece.

And so many more constant and dumbfoundingly bizarre nonsequitur microaggressions. (One of the American I shared office space with lashed out that Canadians didn’t have any ‘real’ Black people so we had to borrow them from Jamaica to compete as athletes in Track and Field.)

So many of these offensive remarks were self contradictory - e.g.,

• Canada doesn’t exist as a nation or culture but at the same time Canadian students are vocally criticized for being ‘so nationalistic’

• there’s no need to include Canada in a listing of macroeconomic indicators of major economies because it’s ‘just a regional economy in in North America’ but only the US indicators are included. Meanwhile, California is profiled and discussed as a separate economy because it’s ‘so large’.

• or a renowned professor who I worked for as a research assistant observing at some random point when he realized where I had done my undergraduate degree ‘Oh, you went to a real place’ - which given how difficult it was to get into that school and program, should never have been a question.

Actually, most campaigns send out a collection team in the day after election day to take down the big sign as well as signs put up on public property. They also typically pick them up from lawns as requested.

Some will wait a day or two to celebrate the win but sign pickup

Most candidates keep the signs from one campaign to another. It takes a while for new signs to be printed at the beginning of a campaign. So, using old signs means getting signs up in the early days before your opponents and saving costs.

Can we talk about deaths per capita and military and civilians contributing to war effort per capita for a country that was NOT itself attacked?

Yes, there were U-Boats attacking merchant marines on the east coast and Japanese balloons flying in on the west. But the societal contribution to a war not in our soil was and is astonishing.

You’re tripping yourself up on the difference between British English and American English. Canadian English is tolerant of both forms.

Oxford, where he wrote his thesis, would require ‘an’ before ‘historic’. When Governor of Bank of England, he would have had to have been careful to use British English.

If you’re a Canadian using American spelling and grammar checkers to define your language, you might wish to reconsider that. MS Word does have Canadian and UK English options.

Good to know.

Perhaps the major changes in the market might lead to some of the foundries rethinking their willingness to do smaller runs.

There are so many Canadian small producers that have stopped producing as manufacturing moved south for economies of scale…

What I would like to see here is Canadian sourced yarn.

Canadian spun yarn from Canadian sourced fibres do exist but are harder to find.

There are also many small Canadian dyers but unfortunately many are buying imported merino yarn that is not ethically sourced.

There are lots of great yarn stores across Canada selling lovely imported yarns as this one is. Especially when this stores’ promoted partners, such as Pacific Yarns, are based in the USA.

I’m sincerely not sure what promoting them does for buying Canadian. I don’t see a focus on promoting Canadian yarn on their main page and the brands listed aren’t specifically Canadian.

Spinrite used to be a Canadian yarn maker but it’s more complicated now, and many of their yarns are available at big box stores.

Perhaps because there’s a big dose of misogyny intertwined with the critique of American Exceptionalism.

Think about how the song would play with genders reversed.

I think you’ll find that many store cards are really Visa or Mastercard.

Many Canadian store cards used to be owned by the stores. Some of the department store ones were very profitable.

However, many firms ‘rationalized’ by getting out of what was seen as a financial services business line to focus on their core retail. Weston’s with PC Financial is an exception - but for many consumers there are other reasons not to go with Loblaws/PC branded financial products.

There are, or at least were, Canadian cast iron makers.

Unfortunately, they seem to rely on Facebook.

See: https://castironcanada.com/

Also, it’s not clear which of these businesses are actually still operating. For example, Bristol Iron Works in Huntsville ON has a danger flagged website and a FB page that hasn’t been updated in years.

Also, you don’t want to be looking to log into dodgy wifi when travelling with a burner phone to another country.

Physical guides are more secure and don’t require downloading to a burner device.

I believe one or two of the new senators have joined Mastodon as well but haven’t seen much from them yet.

Mastodon is very techy. It’s getting good traction there.