As part of this columnist's attempt to keep taxes down and the budget balanced, the following article was written twice as quickly as usual.
It's all part of one person's small effort to help close the fiscal gap that Ottawa's only living realist, Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) Kevin Page, highlighted last week in a typically foreboding report that dumped all over the government's budget plans.
Mr. Page, a professional killjoy in a town full of dreamers, pointed to a dim outlook for the economy and the greying population as reasons that the government's plan to "grow out" of the deficit won't work. In his view, the growth just won't be there. His office predicts that the potential expansion rate of the economy will slump to 1.3 per cent a year in 10 years, down from 3.7 per cent a decade ago. The damping effect on tax revenue, at a time when health care spending is inexorably rising, leaves a hole in the budget that will balloon for decades to come.
The common interpretation of the PBO's findings was that there are only two ways to close the shortfall - higher taxes or a nationwide campaign of governmental cuts.
There is a third option: Start being more productive. That's the most powerful way that Canadians have to control their own fate when it comes to this looming budget problem.
It's either that or leave it to Ottawa to come up with a workable plan to close the gap. That looks unlikely, given the reaction from the government to Mr. Page's report, best summed up as "buzz off, nobody asked for your opinion."
One of the key reasons for the sad sack outlook for economic expansion and the nation's coffers is Canada's weak productivity growth.
It's a huge brake when combined with scant population increases resulting from the country's other productivity crisis - in the bedroom.
The problem is simple arithmetic. Growth in the work force is slowing, as is growth in the amount each worker produces. The result is anemic economic expansion.
It's a powerful argument for a focus in Ottawa as well as executive suites, factories and cubicles across the land on ramping up productivity growth (or the birth rate, but that's a column for another section of the newspaper).
Increasing the pace of annual productivity improvement to 1.7 per cent, from the 1.2 per cent that Mr. Page's office used as a baseline, would cut the fiscal gap by more than one-quarter over the next 75 years, according to the PBO report. That's more impact than a rise in the employment rate of 2 percentage points, or even a full percentage-point decline in interest rates.
However, 1.7 per cent is a big target. Canada's performance has been so lame that productivity improvement lately has been lagging even the 1.2 per cent that Mr. Page uses - clocking in at 0.7 per cent a year between 2000 and 2008, according to Statistics Canada.
Finding the fix isn't easy, because nobody has ever quite nailed down the specific problem when it comes to why Canada lags. The general prescription has always been that Canadian employers need to spend more on technology and educating their workers.
However, in recent years, Statscan estimates Canadians have invested as much on new capital goods as Americans, and the labour forces of the two countries increased their skills at comparable rates. Yet somehow, companies in the U.S. took that extra skill and capital and did more with it.
Economists call the ability to do more with the same inputs of capital and labour "multifactor productivity." Americans accomplish a lot more with the same inputs, to the tune of 1.9 percentage points per year of additional productivity growth between 2000 and 2008, according to Statscan.
Our inability to keep pace is broad-based. We lag in the manufacturing world, information and cultural industries and in finance, insurance and real estate. Over all, Canadian workers in 2008 produced about three-quarters as much as U.S. workers in any given hour, Statscan estimates.
In other words, give an American and a Canadian each 100 lemons and $50 to equip a lemonade stand, and the Canadian's stand will produce only 75 per cent as much juice every hour. Somehow Canadians just find a way to do less.
It can't be that Americans are more talented in almost every industry. Some of it has to come down to effort, to how hard Canadians squeeze their lemons, with all due respect to our self-image as a nation of sloggers.
A portion of the gap also seems to come down to risk taking. Americans will try new and novel ways to get at the last bit of juice in the lemon, even if there's a chance it will fail, while Canadians default to the tried and true even if it's less promising.
Whatever the answer to the vexing productivity question, finding it never seemed all that pressing. The debate was always something for economists and eggheads.
Mr. Page's report changes that. It's time to get to work.