Space available signs on storefronts on Queen Street in Toronto in April, 2020.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
John Turley-Ewart is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant and a Canadian banking historian.
JPMorgan Chase has a dream: to revitalize Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness in America. Its American Dream Initiative will boost the bank’s investments in small businesses to US$80-billion over the next decade, almost tripling the US$33-billion it invested in 2025. The goal is to help people “buy homes, get good jobs and build better lives.”
“The American Dream is alive, but it’s slipping out of reach for too many people – and for future generations,” said Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase.
There is neither a Canadian version of Mr. Dimon nor a Canadian Dream Initiative being pursued by any of our large banks. The best we have is RBC’s CEO David McKay, who last week announced the bank’s new billion-dollar please-don’t-go fund to induce more Canadian entrepreneurs to stay in Canada.
Our bankers don’t talk about realizing a Canadian Dream. It isn’t the Canadian way – and that is the problem. Not with our bankers, but with the state of the Canadian Dream itself. We need a better dream.
John Turley-Ewart: Canada, with a fading economic heartbeat, is no country for white collars
Peace, Order and Good Government is Canada’s counter-narrative to America’s Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Over the last half-century, the Canadian Dream has been shaped by a collectivist impulse: government-led promises to deliver security of life, limb and greater social mobility through a broader safety net. It is the Canadian social contract.
To say it wasn’t a success for a period is to ignore the evidence. For years, low-income families in Canada stood a better chance than low-income American families of seeing their children find their way into the middle class and “buy homes, get good jobs and build better lives.”
To say it is working today is also to ignore the evidence. Those under 35, in particular, are “poorer, more indebted, and more economically precarious than any generation in modern history,” a point made by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson in their book, Breaking Point.
Most have given up on owning a home, they are increasingly giving up on having children, education is no longer a sure path to stable employment, and Canada’s demographics suggest the worst is yet to come.
By 2040, estimates noted in Breaking Point suggest that there will be just two workers for every senior, down from the three-to-one ratio today supporting the country’s social safety net and financing its debt and deficits.
Social backsliding, rather than mobility, is the trend. Young adults born into the middle class are trying to hold on. Those born into low-income families are less hopeful than ever.
Peace, Order and Good Government isn’t helping those over 35 live their Canadian dream either. Order in Canadian society isn’t what Canadians expect. Police forces are under-resourced and, as a recent report in The Hub reveals, both violent and non-violent crimes in Canada are less likely to be solved today than in years past.
Between 2014 and 2018, almost two-thirds of all violent crimes were solved in Canada. Today, it is just over half. In 2024, only 25 per cent of all non-violent crimes were solved. On a per capita basis, as The Hub report shows, the number of police officers fell by 10 per cent between 2012 and 2023.
Roughly six million Canadians do not have access to a regular family doctor, and the national median wait time from referral by a general practitioner to the start of treatment exceeds six months, an increase of more than 200 per cent since 1993.
In 2016, Ottawa revamped the Canada Child Benefit, and in 2018 introduced inflation indexing, which together materially increased child benefits in Canada. It was the right thing to do.
And yet, food bank usage is at record levels. Thirty-three per cent of that usage is attributed to food needed for children by Food Banks Canada, an increase of 340,000 monthly visits in 2025 compared with 2019.
The past half-century of this country’s history suggests that a growing dependence on “Good Government” to raise living standards has come at the expense of giving capitalism room to grow, spark innovation, generously reward hard work, and support economic growth that delivers good jobs and social mobility.
The cost isn’t hard to quantify. Canada has become, as economic scholar Charles Lamman notes, a net exporter of capital. Canadian businesses, individuals and pension funds “have invested a trillion dollars more abroad than the world has invested here.”
When Mr. Dimon thinks of the American Dream, it inspires him to invest in American jobs. If only the Canadian Dream would spark such inspiration to invest in Canada.