This really is a great piece.
Interesting first-person perspective on Carney as a fellow graduate student at Oxford.
But it was the latter half of the piece, that reflects on how Canadians who study in the UK or US are constantly subjected to overly aggressive declarations that deny Canada as a nation, which really hit home for me.
As a Canadian who attended graduate school in the US, I experienced almost verbatim every denial and put down in this piece.
And so many more constant and dumbfoundingly bizarre nonsequitur microaggressions. (One of the American I shared office space with lashed out that Canadian didn’t have any ‘real’ Black people so we had to borrow them from Jamaica to compete as athletes in Track and Field.)
So many of these offensive remarks were self contradictory - e.g.,
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Canada doesn’t exist as a nation or culture but at the same time Canadian students are vocally criticized for being ‘so nationalistic’
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there’s no need to include Canada in a listing of macroeconomic indicators of major economies because it’s ‘just a regional economy in in North America’ but only the US indicators are included. Meanwhile, California is profiled and discussed as a separate economy because it’s ‘so large’.
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or a renowned professor who I worked for as a research assistant observing at some random point when he realized where I had done my undergraduate degree ‘Oh, you went to a real place’ - which given how difficult it was to get into that school and program, should never have been a question.
I appreciate that you recognize that so-called ‘labour productivity’ is primarily a measure of the quality and technological level of the capital that the labour is working with.
Too often, comparative measures of labour productivity and discussion focuses on hours worked, vacation days etc.
These are very much second-order.
Education levels are not second-order but Canadian workers are more literate and better educated across the board than the US manufacturing workers.