I need a Canadian perspective on this...
I agree with a lot of what he says, although I want to preface what follows with the statement that Canada was never some kind of "paradise", and even in our better days the health care system had flaws, our politics has always been slow to get results, and we tend to really overdo things when it comes to throwing bureaucracy at a problem like spaghetti at a wall, hoping it'll stick (it never does; it just piles up on the floor in a nasty mess, getting in the way). That's gotten much worse under the current government, which has ballooned the public service by 40% compared to just 8 years ago.
Canada's still a nice enough place to live if you're lucky enough to have a comfortable job, but in the past it was much more a genuine "land of opportunity". Were you likely to "get rich" here? Probably not, but you had a really good shot at having a nice, middle-class life that I think is the objective of most people. Immigrants who were willing to put in the work were generally able to find a decent job and within 4 or 5 years of arriving, buy a house. Similarly, jobs were there for Canadians of all education levels and the benefits and pay went far enough that the working/middle-class was pretty healthy.
It's worth mentioning that the so-called "average" Canadian home price Maher mentioned is the national average, which is greatly skewed by rural areas. The average price of a home in any urban or surrounding suburban areas (where the actual jobs are) closes in on much closer to a cool million. In the suburbs surrounding Toronto, a completely turnkey, move-in ready detached family home is about $1.6 million (or 1.16 million USD).
I'd say a lot more telling than our debt-to-GDP would be GDP per capita, though. Due to a few factors, Canada is currently in what's called a "population trap", where population growth outstrips economic growth and the result is declining share of wealth of citizens across the board. It's exacerbated the affordability crisis in Canada, particularly, even though inflation has been a worldwide phenomenon since COVID measures ended. In contrast, the US GDP per capita has continued growing over the same period, so even though you're getting hit by inflation you don't feel it as bad down there.
As far as the politics of what he's saying goes, I think there has been some movement among centrist Canadians who are now gravitating to the Conservatives that would have previously supported the Liberals. And it's because the perception is that while both parties have moved "further" in their chosen directions along the spectrum, the Conservatives haven't shifted nearly as far as the Liberals. And those Conservative MPs who hold truly unappealing views on matters such as abortion or same-sex marriage are, thankfully, nameless nobody back benchers and nobody listens to and that the leader of the party rightly reins in.
