Canada Was the “Best Country in the World to Live.” What Happened? | The Walrus

The essay traces Canada's fall across a stack of international indices: first on the UN Human Development Index in 2000, sixteenth by 2025; fifth on Transparency International's corruption index in 1995, fifteenth by 2025; similar drops on press freedom, open data, and rule-of-law rankings. The author notes that political leaders once loved to cite these rankings, especially Jean Chrétien's boast that Canada was the best country in the world to live, and that such citations have quietly vanished as the numbers soured.

The piece links the decline to real conditions among the author's own generation: precarity, unaffordable housing, and shrinking birth rates among former classmates. It argues Canada's usual comparison point, the United States, is the wrong yardstick, since Washington's more dramatic decline has let Canadians feel falsely reassured about their own slide.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.