An opinion piece in the Globe and Mail today referred to Canada as "socialist Canada".
Is Canada socialist? Isn't that an interesting question? From the Canadian Encyclopedia:
"Socialism is a political doctrine that criticizes the existence of social, economic and political inequality in society. Seeking to lessen class inequality, socialists call for a redistribution of power from the affluent owners to the working class.
"Socialists favour collective action by workers to overcome their unfavourable condition. They advocate direct economic organization (eg, the formation of trade unions, labour protests and strikes) and political action (eg, the formation of socialist and/or labour parties) with the goal of reorienting the state from defending the powerful few to protecting ordinary workers."
There are countries that have constitutional references to socialism, and can be considered to be socialist states - Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Portugal are a few with these references.
As I move on looking for the characteristics that define socialist countries, I find a number of organizations that measure this. The top 5 as Iceland, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden and others as Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Moldova, Armenia. The report describes its methodology and the country listing HERE. This review uses 4 metrics - and the one that gets my attention is the Gini Coefficient - it measures income distribution across a population and the wealth gap. A Gini coefficient of 9 indicates perfect equality and a coefficient of 1 indicates perfect inequality. Greater than .4 is a large income gap.
So I find my way to the authority - the World Bank - where you can imagine there are countless measure (so it seems as I scroll through them).
Canada's Gini score - In Canada, the Gini coefficient for 2021 increased to 0.353 (+0.017) following a drop in 2020. It was 31.7 in 2019, so is declining. That's not great news, but it isn't catastrophic. Compare that to the U.S. - The World Population Review says 41.1. What to think. I think that maybe that's part of the socialist label.
Too much insight gives me reason to look for distractions and here's a wonder little lily to do the job.
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