1w ago

Canada has more manufacturing jobs per capita than the US.

Is that even possible? If so, it is an eye opener for what is happening in the American economy and what is causing the MAGA movement.

Let's follow the evidence.

According to this article https://www.npr.org/2025/05/09/nx-s1-5375146/trump-tariffs-factory-jobs-nostalgia?

there are 12.7 million manufacturing jobs in America, down from an all-time high of 19.6 million in 1979.

According to this data base,

https://www.statista.com/statistics/437763/employment-level-in-canada-by-industry/

there are 1.8 million manufacturing jobs in Canada. Applying the standard 1-to-10 ratio (population ratio) that means scaled up proportionate to population Canada would have the equivalent of 18 million manufacturing jobs, just short of America's all time high of almost 50 years ago, let alone the current US job rate.

That caught me completely off guard. Puts a whole new perspective on what Trump is saying about the dire state of the US. Even compared to Canada, the US is in the pits.

Here is another data bomb. One quarter of those US manufacturing jobs are held by immigrants. Not sure WHAT to make of that one.

America does have a problem regarding manufacturing jobs. But tariffs certainly are NOT the solution. If Canada can out-perform the US per capita without the trade barriers of tariffs, exactly what does that say about the condition America is in?

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38 comments

Fair enough.
There are genuine questions about whether or not the federal government should have given in to the provinces and territories in the 1990s regarding vocational and labour market training.
Both of these, and post secondary, are federal jurisdiction or shared jurisdiction at best. (But accreditation of professional associations and credentials is provincial.)
The federal government did its best to continue to directly fund these kinds of programs but the provinces, especially but not exclusively Quebec, felt strongly that this was preventing them to set their own socioeconomic development priorities.
It sounds like both the CPC and LPC federal parties had platforms that look to have the federal government step back into this space.
One has to wonder if they view the agreements they made to transfer labour market training to the provinces and territories as something they can pull back or wind up…
On the agriculture point, let’s say I am more than qualified to speak to economic terminology.
So, it may be pedantic, but it’s important to understand where economics definitions come from.
Some like labour productivity and economic rents are irrevocably tied to their origins in agricultural economic concepts.
Which means that when applied to a manufacturing or service economy, peoples’ intuition about their meaning can be very wrong.
When we’re teaching economics, we talk about ‘developing economic intuition’ but it would be much easier for students if we didn’t have to counter so many counterintuitive terms.
- Or maybe the field should be less 'Ivory Tower' and more concerned with modern economics.
  Compare the battle between MMT and Friedman, and all the old rules and definitions go out the window. To Friedman, it is profit at all costs, to MMT it is social well being at all costs. With MMT, productivity is irrelevant in any analysis no matter what the definition, and to Friedman productivity is irrelevant except as an input cost. Friedman would ratter get rid of all labor as a needless input cost, no matter how productive they were, and MMT would rather have full employment, no matter how low their productivity was.
  If you are a student of Business Admin. or have an MBA, then the old definitions are just swept aside. it is how to make money by using money, not on how to make money by making things.
  When it means 'money in your pocket', the applied meaning takes on an entirely different perspective than when it means 'marks towards graduation'.
  Speaking of definitions, my pet peeve is the use of 'decimate' to indicate total or near total annihilation, when at its roots it means 'one in ten destruction'. I am told that the English Language evolves, and so to the definitions in all fields, including economics, evolve.
  
  Whatever the problems with the old definitions, and they are numerous, they remain the way the national accounts are published in OECD countries.
  But so are too the conventions of generally accepted accounting principles for financial accounting.
  These are the way our data sources are framed so to do meaningful data analysis and interpretation we have to know them.
  Business schools are not immune or exempt from understanding where the data comes from and how it’s constructed. Any good business school in whatever tradition will make sure its students understand that at least.
  It’s one thing be such a pedant as to make students switch from conventional and do basic microeconomics with the P and Q axes reversed (as they logically should be), just to correct a deeply embedded error in the history of economic practice - and there are profs out there who do that.
  It’s another thing to be insistent on what is actually in a measure that calls itself ‘labour productivity’ and is used by uninformed or deliberately misleading business press in Canada to beat on the labour force itself when the structural issues are completely different.
  It would be worth discussing if the business press didn’t constantly misinterpret the meaning of measure.
  
  Ahhh, words of wisdom from the minds of the hard-core dogmatic 'as it was, so shall it always be' cult. It depends if you are teaching history or modern wealth management.
  
  You absolutely are missing the point.
  It doesn’t matter what we’d like it to be.
  Claiming a statistical account measures chickens when it measures albatrosses and then making inferences about chickens, would be silly.
  Likewise, using labour productivity figures from the national income accounts.
  Nothing to say that the points you and others are raising aren’t both much more relevant and interesting.
  But when the business press drags out labour productivity comparisons as if they have anything meaningful to say on the subject, it’s a non sequitur to the conversation you’d really like to have.
  
  When the business press brings out ANYTHING as if they have anything meaningful to say on the subject is a non-sequitur...
  The business press just uses doubletalk to either support or reject the current governance policies. The super=rich ignore it, because by the time it gets into the business press it is too late and they have made their move months ago.

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