Good morning. Today, we’re eating humble pie for breakfast because, somehow, Canada flipped from being a rich G7 country to poorer than Alabama – at least by one important metric. How’s that possible? Here’s a teaser: Alabama is far more advanced than most Canadians expect. That misunderstanding is in focus today, along with trying to understand bitcoin.

Politics: The Bloc Québécois is proposing that banks be liable for customer fraud losses, in an amendment to the Liberal government’s budget bill

Artificial Intelligence: Ottawa is preparing to make a significant investment in a non-profit founded by Yoshua Bengio, a renowned AI researcher who is focused on building safe and trustworthy systems

Agriculture: How Canada’s grain gets to market is a lesson for exporters. From rainy Vancouver weather to flooded railways to labour woes, challenges for shippers keep adding up

Hi, I’m Tim Kiladze, a financial reporter and columnist, and for the past few years, I’ve been dying to know: Is Canada seriously poorer than Alabama? In today’s edition, we’ve got answers, both from talking to economic experts and from travelling to the Deep South for an on-the-ground investigation.

The data point that spurred this panic started flying around economic circles in 2023, largely thanks to some number crunching by economist Trevor Tombe, who measured per capita GDP for every Canadian province and every U.S. state. It took on a life of its own in 2024 when even The Economist wrote about it, all at a time when Canadians had severe economic angst and were furious with Ottawa for runaway home prices and soaring grocery costs.

It would have been understandable if Canada’s economy had fallen farther behind the broader United States, which has been at the forefront of the technological revolution. But Alabama?

The issue ultimately died down because Donald Trump was re-elected and he distracted everyone with his trade war. Then there was a federal election in Canada. But it was still important to know: Is it real? Because if so, it has major implications for Canada’s standing on the global stage.

To get to the bottom of it, two issues had to be studied. First, what did per capita GDP, the measure used to judge our economic standing, really account for? And two, it was time to see what Alabama was up to.

Asking around about per capita GDP, it was quickly clear that its usefulness is hotly contested. No single data point can measure a country’s wellbeing. It can be a good starting point, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. And it doesn’t capture what the average person receives from a country’s production.

But that can’t be the end of the story, because when it comes to Alabama, many Canadians would be floored by what’s happening there.

Huntsville, in the north, is a biotech and aerospace hub, and driving around, you see just as many Subarus as you do pickup trucks. The state has transformed into an auto-manufacturing powerhouse, now producing nearly as many cars as Ontario. Alabama is also bigger than you might think, home to five million people, about the same population as Alberta, and its unemployment rate is now less than half of Canada’s.

In Birmingham, I met Robert Sbrissa, who has seen the economic boom up close. He and his family moved to the region from Montreal in 1996. Initially, they assumed they’d do a two-year bid; in August, it’ll be 30 years in Alabama. “The entrepreneurial spirit was like nothing I had seen or experienced before,” he told me.

The state has its flaws, no doubt. For all the newfound wealth, it’s still one of the poorest in the U.S. Its health care is also, on average, among the worst in the U.S. But simply scoffing at those stats will do Canadians no good, because places like Alabama are competing for the same global capital now – and quite often, they’re winning it. In December, Huntsville won the beauty contest for a US$6-billion Eli Lilly plant. It’s the kind of thing that could have just as easily gone to Montreal, a pharmaceutical hub.

If Canada isn’t careful, places such as the Deep South will continue to steal jobs – and teach us lessons the hard way.

After more than 15 years of bitcoin, we’re no closer to knowing what its point is. It has become a vessel of pure speculation. Why did it skyrocket in the first place? Why did it crash? The cryptocurrency has lost close to 50 per cent of its value, and haters smell blood. The idea that bitcoin is destined to eventually be worthless is gaining traction once again.