> One thing that younger Canadians and foreigners don't seem to grasp is that Canada's economy is basically a handful of abusive corporations pretending to be a country.
I think that's a gross oversimplification. There certainly is a tiny fraction of the population that holds the vast majority of Canada's wealth, but you could say the same of the US or really a lot of other countries, and it's not like all those companies have existed since confederation, so I don't think that's really a reasonable way to define Canada's economy. The Canadian GDP is $1.6 trillion USD, and those companies certainly have a hand in a lot of it, but you'd have to make a pretty long list of companies to even get to $1 trillion...
> But that said, there's also that raising Canadian capital is historically a fool's errand. Raising loonies is so hard it's basically pointless, it's almost always better for entrepreneurs to register as American corporations, pretend to be American, and raise American money.
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> Because, at the end of the day, every party in Canada is beholden to their campaign financiers. Every party. And no money wants to flow outside of the proven channels.
It's more a function of Canadian banking and money management, at least historically, being far more conservative the the US's wild west. There's a reason Canada largely avoided the financial crisis of 2008, and it's not because Canadians are smarter than everyone else.
That said, it's fair to say there have been a number of Canadian tech startups that have done quite well for themselves, not to mention non-tech companies that have managed to be quite successful on the world stage. Maybe not at the same level as the US, but then, few countries can really measure up to that standard (and the consequences that come with it).
While I would say Canada's political parties are beholden to their campaign financiers, that hasn't exactly produced what I'd call "stability" in the political arena... and there's a fair bit of independence between the political arena and the economy (despite how inconvenient that is for some narratives). I wouldn't agree that money can't flow outside of proven channels for that reason. It's more that you have to make a much more solid case to get any significant funding from Canadian sources.