> With the U.S. moving from a cooperative trade partner to a trade competitor, Canada needs to up its game.

Even if the US was still benevolent (ish), Canada needed to up its game. I have heard Canada be described as "European wages with American working hours".

It's a great country with good people and lots of beauty, but they need an economy and job prospect beyond real estate, mining, banking, automotive, and government funded. The country seems to lack diversity in prospects and relatively uncompetitive wages.

For those leaving after completely undergraduate schooling that is taxpayer subsidized, there should be both carrots/sticks to discourage it - carrots would be to substantially juice tuition tax credits to give young people a better shot to save coming out of school. Sticks would be that if you are leaving soon after graduating, you are maybe on the hook for paying back some of that subsidized education. I'm not married to the exact carrots and sticks, but the country probably needs to do something short term while they also sort out future economic growth sectors.

The monumental obstructions to getting anything done in Canada, from bloated beurocracys that are in the business of denying the service they were created to provide is a huge obsticle to starting a business here in Canada, hence the fever dream of joining the EU and exploiting millions of imigrants to do the actual physical stuff for cheap and obiediently, lest they run afoul of the many rules ,regulations and conditions on which there forever pending citizenship depends, which favors existing LARGE businesses to scale up,leaving high talented people with little real oportunity. So ya, a lot of people set out to get a grub stake or just give in and take the highest bid.