Comment by cal5k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cal5k | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That's a popular misconception, but flatly wrong. Canada has the 10th largest GDP in the world. It's larger than Russia's and just shy of Brazil, a country with 209M people vs. 37MM in Canada.

The vast majority of the country is within 100km of the US border, and frankly we've massively under-invested in critical infrastructure like high-speed rail. Our telecoms routinely claim that prices are the highest in the world because of the sparseness of the country, and yet our telecoms are the most profitable in the world. Same for our banks.

No, Canada's real problem is its lack of self-confidence... we still coddle our banks and telecoms, regulating to protect them against foreign competition while failing to enforce competition laws that would prevent anti-competitive behaviour within the country. We seem to be afraid of competing globally on a level playing field even though this would make us better.

It's a very frustrating place to be an entrepreneur, particularly if you have anything remotely resembling a libertarian bent.

I never understood the need to protect a certain class of non-innovative noncompetitive services like banks and telecoms. It just a way to make a few a*holes rich.

It keeps industries (affecting the currency, in the case of banks) stable. There's only 1 asshole to talk to, when it stops being reliable or the populace gets uppity enough for the political animals to notice.

And there you said you didn't understand it

Because we don’t have any practical alternatives to banks; and when banks fail the people who end up losing the most are not their senior management, investors or even employees but the thousands or even millions of account holders.

With Telcos it’s not that different too; if the large one as in those who actually have infrastructure fail it can lead to a catastrophic cascade failure when you can’t call an ambulance not to mention can’t do business because your phones or internet are down you are screwed.

Telcos are like roads it might seem really easy to set new ones up but if you remove all the existing infrastructure that was setup over a century you end up with a lot of short routes that lead up to nowhere.

This is certainly what banks and telcos will tell you, but it’s simply not true.

For example, the idea that banks should maintain appropriate reserves and refrain from taking on certain kinds of risks doesn’t imply that banks should be the arbiters of who is allowed to send and receive digital payments. The movement away from cash to digital has handed them extraordinary power over all economic activity in the country.

Telcos have responded to attempts to shake up the industry by acting in non-competitive ways, the primary reason why NONE of the new entrants from the last wireless spectrum auction still exist as independent entities, and why no foreign telcos have any interest in investing in the space. We don’t enforce our own competition laws, leading to a small group of extraordinarily profitable companies at the expense of the rest of the economy.

> That's a popular misconception, but flatly wrong. Canada has the 10th largest GDP in the world. It's larger than Russia's and just shy of Brazil, a country with 209M people vs. 37MM in Canada.

https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/

Brazil and Russia are not first world European countries. Germany, France and the UK are and have a very small fraction of Canada's landmass.

> The vast majority of the country is within 100km of the US border, and frankly we've massively under-invested in critical infrastructure like high-speed rail.

My point exactly.

> Our telecoms routinely claim that prices are the highest in the world because of the sparseness of the country, and yet our telecoms are the most profitable in the world. Same for our banks.

That is due to monopolistic tendencies and protectionism in Canada.

> No, Canada's real problem is its lack of self-confidence... we still coddle our banks and telecoms, regulating to protect them against foreign competition while failing to enforce competition laws that would prevent anti-competitive behaviour within the country. We seem to be afraid of competing globally on a level playing field even though this would make us better.

Precisely.

> It's a very frustrating place to be an entrepreneur, particularly if you have anything remotely resembling a libertarian bent.

I think it is frustrating for all Entrepreneurs, which is the major reason most of them move South of the border as soon as they reach a certain size (or are acquired).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com