Canada, like the United States, had become accustomed to productivity rising at a rapid pace during the 1950s and 1960s. With this growth in productivity came steady advances in real incomes. But the trend towards higher productivity slowed abruptly in the early 1970s. At the time, policy-makers, business, and labour assumed that the slowdown was cyclical. It wasn’t.
An effective strategy would need to balance the objectives implicit in the four principles by, first, exploiting the complementarities between them and second, recognizing the tradeoffs and, wherever they arise, prioritizing between objectives. Let me elaborate on the “opportunities” and “challenges” provided by each set of objectives.