Most of their "advantages" (in "progressive" policy, "free" healthcare etc.) come from the fact that they have us paying for their defence, coupled with having plenty of natural resources and good geography. It is not a country that seeks or bothers to innovate much beyond riding the coattails of the US like a typical large anglosphere nation. In other words, the Australia of North America. Their primary tech sector functions as a cheap outsourcing service for US companies. The national industries are natural resources, real estate, and immigration. Canadians are tremendously proud of their "recent" innovations that are decades if not centuries old. If you look at the typical Canadian cultural propaganda, the country appears to have nothing to show beyond insulin (invented a century ago) and the Canadarm (a gimmick that allows them to pretend to be an aerospace player). They have no launch vehicle to speak of and their leaders happily destroyed their aerospace industry (see Avro Arrow and the whole Bombardier forced sale incident during the Trump era). The primary reason for their high quality of life is easy access and integration with the US market, without which they would be much poorer. They claim to be a middle power but are more like a middling power. By every metric of innovation and technological achievement, they are an embarrassment.