Is Canada finally waking up? Canada is finally beginning to confront the reality of its economic position, and it comes with a sense of resignation more than surprise. For decades, the Bank of Canada and the country’s policy elite have promoted a narrative of structural resilience. That narrative is now unraveling. Governor Macklem needs to acknowledge what is increasingly evident: Canada’s neutral rate of interest is structurally lower—likely by at least 100 basis points—than previously assumed. The implications are significant. Monetary policy has been persistently miscalibrated relative to the underlying weakness of the real economy. What is striking is not just the deterioration itself, but the delayed recognition. For years, warnings about Canada’s fragility, its overreliance on housing, weak productivity growth, and lack of capital deepening, were dismissed. Now, those vulnerabilities are no longer theoretical; they are manifest. Yes, the economic elite in Canada gave air cover to Trudeaus flawed polices. And yet, instead of confronting these structural shortcomings with clarity, there remains a tendency to externalize blame. Pointing to U.S. politics or figures like Donald Trump as causal factors is not just analytically weak, it reflects a broader unwillingness to engage with domestic policy failures. Canada is not a country lacking in resources or potential. It should rank among the wealthiest and most dynamic economies globally. That it does not is not the result of external shocks alone, but of persistent misjudgments in policy, incentives, and economic strategy. The awakening is overdue. The frustration is that it did not have to arrive this way.