We Canadians love to think of our country as the most virtuous in the world; the country that does everything right. But if we take a quick glance at the results of international studies comparing such things as quality of life, education, health care, and environmental sustainability, we quickly find that, while always doing well, Canada never reaches number 1.
Let’s start with the Human Development Index, the standard tool used for measuring quality of life. Following the UN’s statistics, Canada ranked fourth in 2007 terms of HDI, up two places from 2006 and behind Iceland, Norway and Australia.
The Economist magazine, which uses a slightly different method for calculating quality of life, ranked Canada 14th in its last assessment in 2005.
Moving on to education, we should take a look at the results from the latest PISA test (2006), which compares the scholastic performance of schoolchildren across the world. Canada does, as usual, very well in the tests, but not as well as Finland or Hong Kong. Our country comes seventh in mathematics, third in science, and fourth in reading. This compares with two seconds and a first for Finland, and two thirds and a second for Hong Kong. Once again, we’re near the podium, but we’re not number 1.
The state of the health care system is actually quite worrisome. In its latest ranking of the world’s best health care system, Canada came a dismal 30th, behind such countries as Morocco, Columbia and Saudi-Arabia. When it comes to health care, we’re not just narrowly missing out on the podium, we’re completely out of the picture.
The only competition we seem to be consistently acing is the “fossil awards race”. These awards, handed out by environmental groups, go the countries that have been doing the least to fight global warming. Canada is a leader in that regards. We have been picking up fossil awards at a record braking pace since the year 2000, and show no sign of slowing down. Last December in Bali, environment minister John Baird reached an average of nearly one podium finish per day.
As could have been predicted, we’ve come up with many excuses for our collective lack of action. “Our country is too vast”, some say, “we produce too much oil”, think the others. But the reality is that we didn’t find the courage to actually control spiralling emissions. It can be done: Norway, for example, is also a big oil producer and a fairly vast country –though obviously not like us-, but they’ve actually controlled their emissions and showed the world how it was done.
This can and must change. Canada must aim for number 1. But it will take vision, and this, unfortunately, has been lacking since Mulroney left office.
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