Removing Barriers to Investment, Competition and Movement: A Historical Lesson

This paper revisits Canada’s 1896-1913 boom and argues that its success is often misunderstood as simply a wheat story. The authors contend that the deeper drivers were policy choices that encouraged labour mobility, capital inflows, infrastructure building, and competitive markets. In their reading, the growth surge was made possible by deliberate openness, particularly under the policy environment associated with Clifford Sifton, and not by historical accident alone. That makes the period relevant not just as economic history but as a guide to contemporary policy design.

The modern lesson is that Canada’s weaker growth relative to the United States is not inevitable. The authors argue that today’s economy is held back by policy-created barriers to investment, internal movement, immigration, and competition. By drawing a direct comparison between the openness of the earlier boom period and the frictions of the present, the paper makes a case for removing artificial constraints so Canada can recover some of the dynamism that once narrowed its prosperity gap with the U.S.