"What Makes Canada The Country Of Choice?"
Submitted by backlash on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
- Category: Speeches
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"What Makes Canada The Country Of Choice?"
I propose to start by posing not a simple, but a complex, question and then to address the issues that the question entails, and may be to answer it. The question is this:
"What Makes Canada The Country of Choice?"
Before dealing with the question, let me share with you the reason for my implied claim that Canada is indeed the country of choice.
Every year, the United Nations measures the quality of life in various countries and publishes the results in its "Human Development Report". The UN expresses the final result in terms of "Human Development Index" or HDI. This composite index measures life expectancy, educational attainment and income per person.
Canada has ranked number one six times in the past eight years, and finished a very close third twice, once behind Norway and Australia, and the second time behind Norway and Sweden. Canada has consistently outranked the United States by a considerable margin. I mention comparison with the US, as it is our prosperous and powerful neighbor, our main trading partner and the country of reference in our discussions of socio-economic issues and policies like health care, environment, education, culture and security.
Clearly being rich- that is having the highest per capita income -dose not make a country a place of choice to live in. In fact, the US would have outranked Canada and all other countries except Luxemburg if income per person were the only criterion of measuring the quality of life. It should be noted that the income criterion based on Gross Domestic Product per person does not say anything about how equitably the total wealth is distributed, nor does it expose the extent of appalling poverty amidst enormous affluence.
By the UN reckoning then, Canada clearly excels in human development. We may now ask why human development is so important to the quality of life?
We have all been hearing our...
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