With all the talk from our new prime minister about making Canada an international energy superpower because of our abundant resource base, the team of economists at CIBC Capital Markets want to point out we have another superpower in the service sector.
In short, this is the knowledge-based part of the economy. Things like finances, education and health, software or IT and engineering.
It turns out Canada is already pretty strong in this arena and it is even a bigger part of our economy than goods production, accounting for nearly three-quarters of Canada’s GDP.
When it comes to exporting those services, well, we are top of the G7 pile.
Growth of our service-related exports in the past decade has reached roughly 60-percent, higher than any other advanced nation. Germany, Italy and then the US are behind us. The growth in our goods exports, on the other hand, is closer to five-percent.
One reason we built this expertise is resource development. We have deep knowledge in financing megaprojects and strong engineering know-how to design and build them.
