On the road to full economic potential The performance of the Canadian economy over the past 25 years has been rather disappointing. The economy has suffered from recurring bouts of boom and bust, and unemployment has been very high. The growth of productivity and, thus, the improvement in our standard of living have been very gradual. Canada is not unique in this respect.
Most industrial countries have shared this experience to varying degrees. And that includes the United States. Since the early 1990s, however, the U.S. economy has performed remarkably well and substantially better than other industrial economies. That country has enjoyed a solid, six-and-a-half-year-long economic expansion. Over that period, employment growth has averaged 2 per cent per year.