By Don Curren
In some families, parents keep track of their children’s growth by marking their height at successive ages on a door frame, poignantly marking their maturation in a series of height lines and dates in pencils.
Canada will be celebrating its 145th birthday on Sunday, and BMO Financial Group has taken a similar measure of the country’s relatively short life. The bank has been well placed to watch Canada grow, having been founded in 1817, fifty years before Canada’s confederation in 1867.
Establishing that year, or thereabouts, as its baseline, the bank sized up a series of key statistics in time for July 1 celebrations.
–Canada’s population has grown almost exactly tenfold since then, to just shy of 35 million from 3.5 million.
–Gross domestic product per capita has rocketed from 3,100 Canadian dollars, measured in current terms in 1870, to C$56,000 now.
–The value of Canadian exports is at C$44.8 billion, almost a thousand times higher than its 1866 level of C$50.3 million. Some of that dramatic increase was driven by price gains in two important Canadian exports. The cost of a barrel of oil has risen to about $80 from $2.41 back in the day. And an ounce of gold gets you about $1,600 today, up from $18.93.
Happy Canada Day.