Alabama is eating our lunch and we're still arguing about the menu
Tim Kiladze went to Alabama to test a provocative stat. He came back with harder questions than he expected — and most of them were about us
Tim Kiladze had never heard of Huntsville, Alabama before he pitched the story. He’d seen the stat — Canada’s GDP per capita had dipped below Alabama’s — and half-wondered if it was real.
So the Globe sent him south. And what he found wasn’t cotton fields or Confederate flags. It was the foothills of the Appalachians, a biotech research park where the dominant car in the parking lot was a Subaru Outback, and a mayor who’d spent 18 years rebranding his city with lapel pins that read “Huntsville: a smart place.”
Tim described a feeling he couldn’t shake the whole time he was in Alabama — that these people were hungry. Hungry to attract jobs, hungry to build, hungry to prove the stereotypes wrong. He compared it to what he sees at home in Canada and the gap was immediate: we Canadians expect things to come to us.
The economic story backs up the vibe. Mercedes-Benz showed up in 1993. Alabama rolled out aggressive tax incentives, won the bidding war, and got that first plant built. Then Honda came. Then Hyundai. Then Mazda and Toyota. Alabama now produces 1.2 million vehicles a year. Ontario does 1.3 million. That gap used to be enormous. Not anymore.
Tim met Greg Canfield, the state’s former commerce secretary, who was candid about the fact that early incentive programs were unsustainably generous. They reformed the whole thing 20 years in. But by then Alabama had something it didn’t have before: a reputation for speed. Companies knew they could build fast there. Speed to market became the selling point.
Speed to market. What a concept.
Because here’s what was happening in Canada the same week Tim’s piece came out: Enbridge announced it wouldn’t participate in the proposed Alberta-to-Pacific pipeline. Why? Because the company looked at the regulatory environment and decided it couldn’t justify sinking capital into something that might never get built.
Alabama gets plants built in two years. Canada can’t convince a company to start.
Tim went further in our conversation than he did in the piece. He’d spoken recently with people involved in major Canadian project proposals — people who want to get things done. He asked them: are these projects going to happen? The collective answer: “I don’t know.”
One variable he double-clicked on is the courts. Duty to consult rulings, judicial reviews, First Nations groups that have learned — understandably, given the history — to use legal processes to slow or stop development. Northern Gateway was killed by BC courts, not by a change in government policy. Tim worried aloud that no matter which party holds power in Ottawa, the courts remain the bottleneck.
That should alarm us more than any GDP comparison.
And this is before we consider what we’re up against competitively. The US runs a nearly $2 trillion annual deficit that juices growth and funds the subsidies making places like Alabama attractive to global capital. Canada can’t do that. As Andrew noted, the UK learned what happens when you try — the Liz Truss mini-budget crashed a government in six weeks. The fiscal space available to a mid-sized democracy is fundamentally different.
Tim’s suggestion: maybe you can’t compete across the board, but maybe you can be selective. Pick a handful of industries, fund them properly, accept the trade-off. The China model, but with guardrails. That’s essentially what Carney’s Major Projects Office is supposed to do. Whether the machinery of government — and the courts — will let it work remains an open question.
There’s something else that gets lost in the competitiveness discourse. Tim was emphatic: he wouldn’t want to live in Alabama.
Life expectancy there is 74 years versus Canada’s 82. Minimum wage is $7.25 US. A Canadian expat told Tim his son’s high school had the same turf as Gillette Stadium. Twenty-five miles down the road, kids don’t have books. Low regulation, low taxes, weak unions, minimal safety net — that combination generates impressive top-line growth. But the growth doesn’t reach everyone.
Canada chose a different operating system. Public healthcare, public education funded at the regional level, stronger labour protections. But it’s not all roses here either. Tim’s kids go to a public school in Toronto that he described as looking like a bomb shelter. He tried to get a wall painted and hit union rules and red tape. Our healthcare system has ICU bed shortages we identified during COVID and still haven’t fixed, a nursing crisis everybody acknowledges and nobody resolves, and ERs where doctors go public because conditions have become a travesty.
We hide behind our morals. That was Tim’s line. We point to the values encoded in our system and use them as reasons not to look in the mirror. The values are good. The execution has been declining for years. And at some point, poorly executed values stop being values. They become rhetoric.
The UK has been having this conversation for over a decade. In 2014, Fraser Nelson at the Spectator concluded Britain was poorer than every US state except Mississippi. In 2023, John Burn-Murdoch at the FT sharpened the point: strip London out, and the rest of the country drops below Mississippi. Nothing changed. The debate gets relitigated, the same objections get raised, and the underlying problems compound.
I worry Canada is settling into the same pattern. In 2007, the Harper government’s competitiveness review concluded: “Canadians do not perceive that there is an imminent crisis.” Tim wrote that if Ottawa commissioned another report today, the conclusion could easily be the same.
The debate about whether Canada is technically poorer than Alabama is interesting. It’s also a trap — the metric debate is where the conversation goes to die. The harder questions never get asked. Why did Eli Lilly choose Huntsville over Montreal for a $6 billion pharmaceutical plant? Why is Enbridge walking away from a pipeline? Why are people inside the system telling reporters, on background, that they don’t know if major projects will get built?
Alabama is just the mirror. What it reflects back is a country that built an operating system for a world where being a G7 nation was enough. That world is gone. And the operating system hasn’t been updated.