Boring is the new Sexy

Canada Will Emerge From Global Crisis First

First Published Date: April 25, 2009

For a long time now Canada has had to put up with jibes about being a boring country. This is something that Canadians have come to live with in a sense. Being called boring isn’t nice, exactly, but there comes a point where you cease to care what people think about you based on your nationality. Equally, ask an Irish person if it bothers them to be called “stupid”. This clichéd image of friendly, but drunken and unintelligent Irish, people was common currency for years. That Ireland had turned out Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats was ignored. Now Irish people are happy for someone to underestimate them – as it means the advantage is with them.

Equally, while Canada was carrying on being “boring”, other more “exciting” nations were mortgaging their futures on the wave of credit that never seemed to slow at all. While the banks were taking on customers in their millions, and those customers were buying expensive goods, houses and cars, there may well have been many people who looked at Canada from the outside and considered its financial caution to be boring and pedestrian. But looking at Canada’s financial position, which has attracted somewhat envious compliments from US President Barack Obama, who would swap places with the “exciting” countries now?

Yes, there is a recession in Canada, and it will not be here today, gone tomorrow. There are hurdles to clear, and right now it is a little more difficult to get a home loan than it was a few years ago. But with the government’s financial policies having stipulated caution while all around were deregulating and hiding behind credit – very shaky credit at that – the Canadian banks have not required bailouts like in the US, Britain, Germany and elsewhere. This means that while those countries are still recovering from the battering that their economies took, and looking at a tax burden that could persist for some time, Canada will emerge in a better position.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has recently expressed an opinion that will probably write a thousand headlines between now and the end of the global crisis. Speaking to a seminar in Chicago on financial literacy he gave the opinion that “boring is the new sexy”. There are very few countries in the world that would not love to be where Canada is right now, and fewer still who wouldn’t like to be where Canada is going. Having succumbed last to the crisis, Canada is due to escape it first – and then, the possibilities are intriguing.

Sure, nothing is guaranteed in this climate, and even if there are positive signs, it would not be a typically “Canadian” attitude to crow about the relative strength of our position. But if the current global situation shows us anything, it is that being “boring” while everyone else is counting on the goose to continue laying golden eggs can be a very wise decision. Just watch the other global economies once they are back on their feet. They’re likely to be a lot more “boring” than before. Especially now that they know how sexy it is.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Canadapersonalfinancewebsite.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to A Dawn Journal. This article originally published on the above website on Apr 25, 2009.