Fareed Zakaria on a Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

Good piece by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek this week about why Canada’s financial sector has weathered this financial crisis so well:

Guess which country, alone in the industrialized world, has not faced a single bank failure, calls for bailouts or government intervention in the financial or mortgage sectors. Yup, it’s Canada. In 2008, the World Economic Forum ranked Canada’s banking system the healthiest in the world. America’s ranked 40th, Britain’s 44th.

Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the 15th-largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the others have all shrunk.

[. . .] If President Obama is looking for smart government, there is much he, and all of us, could learn from our quiet—OK, sometimes boring—neighbor to the north. Meanwhile, in the councils of the financial world, Canada is pushing for new rules for financial institutions that would reflect its approach. This strikes me as, well, a worthwhile Canadian initiative.

The full article is worth reading. Nice to see that someone is noticing these increasingly striking difference between Canada and the US of late. This is not to say that Canada is not also facing a dire situation at the moment. We’re shedding jobs quickly and the Conservative government’s bailout package, as Bob Rae so beautifully pointed out in the National Post this weekend, looks like it will be putting a lot of money in many of the wrong places. People on both sides of the border are anxious as to whether or not any of the stimulus packages each country is putting forward will help.