I really can't. I'm not going to try to devine how this government thinks. I would just note it's the slowest growth over the last 10 years, not 30, as you indicated.
What's really important is not how we compare to countries halfway around the world. What's really important is how we compare to our neighbour to the south. We can see that every day. Every time we cross the border, every time we turn on the TV, every time we look at social media, we're comparing ourselves to the United States. The comparison that really counts is how we compare with the U.S. There we do very badly. All of this comes from Edmund Phelps and his work on innovation.
The U.S. is by far the most innovative economy in the world. When you go to Europe, they want to know how the Americans do it. How did they create Facebook, Apple, Google—these world-beating companies? How do they do this over and over again? Everybody wants to recreate that level of innovation.
We used to have world-beating companies. Ten or 20 years ago we had half of a dozen of the leading hundred companies in the world. Today we have one, Shopify, and it's had some trouble recently as we get away....
I think it's especially useful to compare ourselves to the U.S. We have the example right next door on how to do it right, and we don't seem to be looking at that at all. Instead we look at the U.S. and say, “Oh, they did this wrong or that. They're idiots about capital punishment and gun laws.” They get innovation, and we should be learning from that.