Excellence, part 1

“Canadians are uncomfortable with success”. We’ve all heard that line before. It’s a long standing favourite of lazy political journalists and it also makes a habit of invading the pages of our annual identity-crisis paperbacks. It’s a nice phrase, and it certainly has an element of truth. Whatever way one puts it, we clearly have a problem: Canada and excellence just don’t click.

Let’s take for example, our Canadian universities. They’re considered good by most people, sometimes very good, but they’re never the best. In the widely followed Academic Ranking of World Universities, the University of Toronto ranked as Canada’s best at 24th in the world. It’s a very good showing, but hardly outstanding. Consider that in the top ten of that ranking, the U.S had eight Universities and the U.K. had two. That’s an average of about one top ten university for thirty million people, which means that judging strictly by population, Canada should have one. Instead we simply make excuses. “History is not on our side”, we claim. Fair enough, except that McGill had an international reputation in the early 20th century that was sacrificed to chronic underfunding. “Our universities are public whereas theirs are private”. Yes, but we still spend less per-capita on our public universities than Americans do on their state schools.

It’s no coincidence that Canada was recently ranked by the Conference Board as the second-least innovative country of the G7. If we don’t sustain world-class universities, we can’t expect to produce cutting-edge research. The Conference Board wrote that Canada’s “failure to innovate” is sinking us into "a mediocrity that is hampering what we can do and what we can be." Our lack of research is spilling over into other areas of society like health care, environmental protection and the economy; in other words, mediocrity is contagious.