(February 17 – 10:20 ET) – Royal Bank chief economist John McCallum warns that Canada’s prospects depend on creating attractive job opportunities and improving living standards for the next generation.

McCallum delivered the message yesterday at the University of Waterloo University’s lecture series, entitled, “2020: Building the Future.”

“The future prosperity of Canada is dependent on the abilities of business and government leaders to reverse the relative decline of living standards during the past ten years. If this trend continues for the next ten years Canadian living standards will be a mere 50 per cent of those in the United States,” said McCallum.

Critical for building prosperity, said McCallum, are a strong education and lifelong training-retraining system, an environment that is conducive to highly-skilled people and high value- added economic activity, and a skilled and innovative business sector.

“We have to balance Canadians’ traditional self-vision as a more egalitarian, gentler society against the need to remain competitive and grow or at least maintain living standards in relation to other countries,” McCallum said. He notes that egalitarianism needs economic growth to survive and that Canada needs to improve its climate for growth. That means both personal and business tax cuts.

“We need a regulatory system that places more weight on global competitiveness issues and is capable of acting in a more nimble fashion than has traditionally been the case,” he added.

For more on this story watch out for Catherine Harris’ front page story in the upcoming Mid-February issue of Investment Executive.
-IE Staff