canada has inflation, very loose credit policies such as fractional reserve banking, & incredibly fraudulent stock market, bond, and derivitive policies and the subprime crisis only nicked our banking system...our economy wasn't affected much either: we're losing some growth due to the recession in the usa (our biggest trading partner) but our economy probably won't go into a recession...canada has more bank regulation and as a result, the best banking system in the world:
Canada rated world's soundest bank system: survey | Reuters

bad lending practices on the part of the banks caused the current economic crisis: bad mortgages and bad mortgage back securities...regulation will reduce that risk significantly

the economy will rebound with or without government intervention, but the government has a role to play in mitigating the effects on poor people, and rebuilding a strong middle class...up here in soviet canuckistan, almost two thirds of the social programs go to the middle class...even millionaires get handouts from the government...i know that is considered evil socialism in some parts of the usa, but without government programs, the canadian middle class would have shrunk by about 6 percentage points between 1980 - 2000...instead, our middle class grew by 4 percentage points during the same period


Canada: The rise of the middle class
The secrets of Canada's world-leading middle-class success
DOUG SAUNDERS
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
August 4, 2007 at 12:00 AM EDT

LONDON ?? This long weekend, as Canadian highways fill with lakeside-bound cars and airports with resort-bound families, it is hard to believe that we are anything but a middle-class nation.

After years of full employment and impressive economic growth, you'd think the entire country had been elevated into the secure world of home ownership, retirement savings and weekends on the dock. There's some truth to this vision ?? but it's a lot stranger than you'd think.

The middle class, around the world, is in trouble. As my articles from India in the past two weeks have shown, poor countries are seeing stunning growth without producing the sort of big, sustainable middle class that leads to peace and long-term stability. There are too many barriers to prevent people from leaving poverty.

But what about countries such as ours, which have had big middle classes for decades? Here, we see a surprising version of the same effect ?? with notable exceptions. A comprehensive look at the workings of the world's middle class has just been published by Steven Pressman, an economist at Monmouth University in New Jersey. In his The Decline of the Middle Class: An International Perspective, Canada plays a fascinating role.

From 1980 to 2000, a period of explosive economic growth and expanding wealth, most major Western nations actually saw their middle classes shrink in size. The middle-income ranks (earning 75 to 125 per cent of the median income) in Britain shrank by 4.5 percentage points; in Sweden by 7.1 points; and in the U.S. by 2.4 points. These numbers represent tens of millions of people.

Were all these people disappearing from the middle class because they got rich? Or had they failed to find a place on the economic escalator and slipped to the ground floor?

??There was both upward and downward mobility,? Mr. Pressman told me, ??but downward mobility exceeded upward mobility by around two to one.?

But there are exceptions to this trend. Switzerland's and Germany's middle classes stayed roughly the same size. And two countries ?? Norway and Canada ?? saw their middle classes grow substantially. In Canada, it grew to 37 per cent of the population from 33 per cent, the equivalent of a whole mid-sized province joining the station-wagon brigade, moving Canada into the league of Scandinavian nations in the size of its middle class.

Some of this came from wealthier Canadians being humbled: During the same 20 years, the upper class shrank by 1.9 percentage points, to 33.3 per cent of the population. But more came from poor families moving up. Canada is a middle-class success story, especially compared with the slouching United States. But the story doesn't end there.

Mr. Pressman set out to learn what is making the middle class collapse in many countries but expand in others. Some have attributed these changes to an aging population, the number of working women or divorce rates. He used statistical methods to remove age and gender from the picture, but the patterns remained the same.

Then he looked at unemployment: Were countries with rising employment rates experiencing a growing middle class? Nope. Britain has far lower unemployment than Canada, but a shrinking middle class: ??While jobs were being added, households were not moving into the middle class.? In the Netherlands, unemployment fell dramatically, but the middle class declined.

Then Mr. Pressman took his data and subtracted everything except salary and wage earnings. That is, he looked at what would be happening if people lived off only the money paid by their employers.

Suddenly, everything changed. Canada's great middle-class boom turned into an enormous decline: If people were forced to live off their earnings alone, our middle class would have shrunk by a staggering six percentage points. The same was true in Germany. In Britain, the middle class would have contracted even more dramatically.

What had Mr. Pressman subtracted? In short, government: All the handouts, tax benefits, subsidies and rebates that transfer money into middle-class pockets (not including pensions). Without government help, Canada's middle class would be endangered.

In a modern economy, Mr. Pressman told me, ??I am not sure that the middle class can be self-sustaining. It seems to require active government policies. The market tends to produce great inequalities in income; these inequalities seem greater in a global economy.? Contrary to earlier economic belief, the countries that are most competitive in a globalized economy are those with the most robust tax-and-spend programs. But they have to be aimed at the right places.

Many Canadian families wouldn't be middle-class if it weren't for government handouts. One key example is the thousands of dollars that Ottawa reimburses parents for child-care expenses each year: Without it, many women wouldn't be able to work, so their families would be deprived of one income and may slide into the lower-class bracket. Tax-funded aid for education savings, first-time home buying, retirement savings plans and medical coverage add up: If you gave up all these breaks, would you still be in the middle class?

I compared these findings to information on the money governments actually spend on different classes and got a surprising result: The countries doing well are the ones that don't just help out the middle class, but do so at the expense of the poor.

Canada hands a comparatively paltry 22 per cent of its spending to the poorest three-10ths of the population and a generous 64 per cent to the middle four-10ths, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Germany, one of the few other countries with a non-shrinking middle, gives only 22.3 per cent to the poor.

Compare that with Britain, whose Labour government spent the 1990s changing social programs so that the money went to the poor rather than the middle class; in Britain today, 34.7 per cent of social spending goes to the lowest-income third ?? and yet the British middle class has shrunk. In Sweden, where almost 30 per cent of spending goes to the poor, the middle class was clobbered.

It may be that traditional welfare-state programs do more to keep people in poverty than to guide them out ?? a criticism that has been levelled from both the left and the right. Or perhaps there's a new sub-class of ??precarious? casual workers, who never are quite poor enough to qualify for welfare or prosperous enough to earn the state benefits of the comfortable middle. Such workers, key to our new national wealth, could be in serious trouble.

Herein lies the paradox of the modern middle class: Its existence is reliant on a thriving and open market economy, but its size and sustainability are equally dependent on the tax-and-spend mechanisms of the modern welfare state ?? which, it turns out, are even more important in globalized, high-competition economies.

The countries that are doing best are those that spend serious money on cultivating and maintaining a middle class. Many poor countries, despite having developed booming economies during the past 15 years, fail to join the middle-class club because they can't afford to erect government-supported stepladders to success. And countries such as Canada, which can and do spend that money, have done the best at surviving the social turmoil of our age.