The Prime Minister’s signature economic move has been the investment summit: rooms full of memoranda, capital “mobilized” in press-release increments. But business investment per worker — the actual engine of productivity — has not responded. A $55.28 billion deficit buys demand today; it does not buy the permitting reform, regulatory harmonization, or competitive tax treatment that make capital deploy itself tomorrow.
The government’s theory appears to be that productivity can be convened into existence. Yet the structural files stay closed: interprovincial barriers stand, federal red tape multiplies, and the tax system continues to penalize the exact risk-taking the speeches celebrate. When the state substitutes for the market, the market waits.
That wait is the quiet tax on every Canadian paycheck. Wages rise with output per hour, not with ministerial calendars. A government that borrows $16.4 billion in a quarter while deferring the reforms that would make repayment painless is choosing applause over arithmetic.
The Point: Summits produce photographs; productivity produces paychecks. Until the structural files move, the investment narrative is a substitute for the growth plan it claims to be.