The rate of growth in our productivity has certainly slowed since the early 1970s, as it has in most industrial countries, for reasons that are still not fully understood. But the level of our productivity has been rising, not falling. And it cannot be blamed for the decline in some measures of our living standards during the 1990s.
However, there is a significant gap in levels of productivity between Canada and the United States ours is below theirs. Since access to ideas and technology is international, we would have expected that gap to narrow, as it did during the 1950s and 1960s. But it hasn’t.