TORONTO - Canada is a G-8 country with a trillion-dollar annual gross domestic product (GDP), an internal market of 33 million people and tight integration into the massive United States economy.

The second largest national landmass after Russia, Canada is richly endowed with natural resources including aluminum, iron ore, nickel, zinc, copper, gold, lead, molybdenum, potash, diamonds, silver, fish, timber, wheat, coal, petroleum, natural gas and hydro power.

"Our geography is our biggest asset and our greatest challenge", says Graham Carver, President of Cambridge Management Planning in Toronto. "We have a small population and capital pool relative to our geography, so certain nation-building projects, such as the first banks, railroads and even pipelines, were undertaken by private capital with a degree of government direction.

"It’s really only in the past 40 years that we’ve had sufficient economic mass to gradually leave that kind of co-operative capitalism behind", says Carver, a native of the United Kingdom who founded his executive search and business consulting firm in Toronto in 1976 and made it part of IIC Partners Executive Search Worldwide in 1998. A Vice Chair of IIC Partners, Carver keeps a busy international travel schedule and takes a global view of events in Canada.

Today, he says, Canada is the largest supplier of energy to the United States, ahead of Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Oil sands deposits give Canada the second largest oil reserve base in the world (175 billion barrels) after Saudi Arabia (259 billion barrels) and have attracted several tens of billions of dollars of new projects.

Manufactured exports include vehicles and parts, industrial machinery, aircraft, telecommunications equipment, chemicals and plastics. Though vehicle manufacturing is one of Canada's leading industries, it’s largely an offshoot of the troubled U.S. auto sector, currently experiencing the same slow decline in market share against Asian and European competition.

Exports provide about $405 billion in annual value or about one-third of total GDP. About 85 per cent of all exports go to the U.S., where market access is assured through the North American Free Trade Agreement, which also includes Mexico.

Canadian GDP is currently growing at a rate of 2.8 per cent per year, with GDP per capita of $35,200 per year, which is second only to the U.S. among leading industrialized nations.

The World Factbook of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency describes Canada as:

an affluent, high-tech industrial society in the trillion-dollar (US)
class, (resembling) the US in its market-oriented economic system, pattern of production, and affluent living standards.

Socio-economics

The Federal (national) Government has turned in consecutive balanced budgets since 1997, but nine of ten provinces, excluding oil-rich Alberta, are challenged by deficits resulting in part from mounting costs of universal free healthcare. There is now an ongoing debate over how to fund a healthcare system that many Canadians consider a defining characteristic of their society.

There’s a similar approach to education in a country that has a 99-per-cent literacy rate. Canadian federal and provincial governments provide strong public support to post secondary education, with resulting low average costs of tuition across the country. National average annual tuition rates, as reported by Statistics Canada for 2004 were :

   * Sciences $3,954
   * Engineering $4,371
   * Commerce $3,991
   * Law $5,995
   * Medicine $9,406
   * Dentistry $11,733

In the past five years, the Canadian dollar has risen from an exchange value of 62 cents U.S. to above 85 cents. Inflation has been tightly controlled for more than a decade and is currently running at about two per cent. Unemployment is 6.1 per cent nationally, but this ranges from less than four per cent in Alberta and British Columbia to 6.3 per cent in Ontario and 14.3 per cent in Newfoundland.

Across the country, average family income after taxes was $62,700 in 2004. This included unemployment insurance, pensions and other benefits.

In 2006, Statistics Canada indicated average wages of hourly-paid workers were:

   * Construction $22.96 per hour
   * Healthcare $21.92/hr
   * Manufacturing $20.76/hr
   * Retail $15.18/hr
   * Food services $10.48/hr

Canada’s economic future will, as always, be powerfully influenced by events in the United States, Carver says. But in recent years, Canada’s ship has floated just slightly higher on the global economic tide.  

Graham Carver is former Vice Chair of the Americas region for IIC Partners, a top-ten global executive search organization with more than 50 offices in 41 countries.