Um, well, ok then, I tried...





I'm going to back out of here slowly now.

Be careful of the Illuminati on your way out.

As impressive as your "93 in Grade 10 Social Studies" is, I would suggest that there may be people on this forum with even more impressive credentials when it comes to things like constitutional and administrative law.

And that's correct...you're just drawing the wrong conclusion from it (I'm being generous here).

It's pretty funny how a bunch of useless figureheads are getting people all riled up. I'd bet that some people think Kate and Will taking a dump is something worth treasuring.

No offence but this is the most ridiculous post in this thread. The reason we're rich has nothing to do with resources. Plenty of poor countries have a wealth of resources. We're rich for the same reason that Germany and South Korea and Britain are rich. Our resources are just gravy.

Trillions of dollars of resources isn't much considering we have a $1.6 trillion economy. Most of that is services and industry. You don't get as rich as Canada by being a resource dependent economy, and countries like Congo are poor precisely because they're resource dependent.

There are countries that have gotten richer than Canada by selling oil (and lots of countries that haven't). Extracting the oil does require technology and expertise but that can be imported.

It's misleading to simply add up the current market value of things taken out of the ground in Canada, compare that to a GDP number, and then conclude that the well-being of the country doesn't depend on exporting resources. Many industries in Canada exist because of resources (trucking company moves logs around). Similarly the service economy feeds off of money that comes from resources (miners go shop at Wal-Mart, company sells heavy industrial equipment). The total impact on the economy is quite large.

Wealth has nothing to do with resources abundance, it has to do with their exploitation. I know the Canada/Uganga comparison was exaggerated, it was just a joke. I wanted to play osmo's game but I decided to cut the part where I was saying that the Queen would prevent us to escape because we belong to her, however I forgot to cut the cars' part...


I totally agree! :cheers:

True, but there are plenty of examples of countries with resources (pretty much most of Africa) that are poor as dirt, and countries with almost no resources that are - or have been - wealthy as all hell (Japan, others).

Obviously our resources bring us wealth, but it's not just because we have them.

+1 Monarchy. :)

When it comes to exploiting/utilizing our resources, I think Canada is middle of the road. Canada's neither pissing it away (below average utilization) nor making the best of it (above average utilization). We should be doing better, I'm looking at you Norway, but we could be doing a lot worse, I'm looking at you Nigeria.

Big nod from me on this. Although, that kinda defines Canada - we're pretty much middle of the road for everything, eh?

Typical, modest, boring Canada. ;)

Okay, sure there's a few tiny countries like Kuwait that have got rich from oil. But those are extremely rare. Even UAE and Norway are diverse enough that resources are only one piece of the pie. In Canada resources account for a much smaller percentage of the economy than in those countries.

Yes, resources impact the economy but not as much as people believe. It's one of those self-defeating myths we've created about ourselves.

I say ditch. I'm not a Canadian and republicanism isn't perfect, but I definitely think it's a better system than constitutional monarchism, especially considering your monarchy isn't even based in your own country. Australia should be a republic too.

But if you look at the system itself, ours is working better than the American one right now, aside from the unfair electoral process which can be changed while maintaining the constitutional monarchy.

Could you please explain how it's a better than constitutional monarchy as is used in Canada? If you can please use facts.

Canada's top executive and elected government head are two different people. Our head of state/Sovereign holds the power but doesn't use it. The elected gov't uses the power but doesn't hold it.

Canada's head of state is based in Canada.

I agree with this. Norway IMO is a good example. because they leverage their resources to build up the other sectors of the economy, infrastructures, and overall society which circles back into more innovation and technology and thus matures there economics much faster. I think people do underestimate how much resources mean to Canada - when literally a slow year in North Alberta can cause national figures to plunge. In more matured/diverse economies usually a switch to something else or would fill that void, but that doesn't happen as much as it should here in Canada.

Nigeria is a basket case, it really should be on the level of development as say Libya, or South Africa; its quite sad. But they have a lot of political issues which hinder this, the country should really be two units, they have a Muslim and christian split which bogs down the country and leaves it ripe for corruption as people swoop in to swindle as the two dominate sides bicker with each other.

For the poster who tried to downplay are resources when comparing it to GDP, just keep in mind Congo has (by conservative estimates) over 63 Trillion dollars worth of natural resources. Canada by modest accounts would be double or triple that. The global tally for economic output is roughly 55 trillion. We sit on probably close to 100 trillion dollars worth of natural wealth and fail to use it to a full potential. We could have top-class infrastructure like Japan or Germany, top-tier education and research; the possibilities are endless.

Canada is still a mono-economy, we don;t bring in innovative wealth like USA, where a flow of ideas has kept food on their tables for decades. Every now and then we get a dominant player like a RIM, or Corell, but they always seem to flame out (then picked apart and sold). We can do better.

Okay I know this is getting really off topic here, but I can't read stuff like this and not say anything. This is what I was talking about when I said we create self-defeating myths about ourselves. Canada is about as far from a "mono-economy" as you can get. Our research and IT sectors are way bigger than you think and just as significant as resources, if not more so, in terms of both employees and economic impact. Sure when oil in Alberta struggles it impacts the country, but when IT in Ontario struggles the country feels it just as much. Yes we should be investing a lot more in tech and R&D, but if you think all we have is RIM and Corel you have no idea.

http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ict-tic...h_it07229.html