Employment contracts in the US can be at-will, which means either party can walk away at any point for no reason.
Sounds awful, until you look at US salaries and average wealth levels. Turns out that easy firing = easy hiring = more demand for workers = easier to be an entrepreneur = even more hiring = more market power for workers.
The situation can vary by province, but hiring/firing employees in Canada immediately exposes businesses to significant government-imposed overhead (both administrative and financial) and risk.
Maybe this is somewhat tolerable for larger organizations with dedicated HR and accounting teams, but dealing with all of the unnecessary and pointless government-imposed overhead and risk definitely harms the productivity of smaller organizations. This is especially true for small businesses that may consist of just one entrepreneur, who's also possibly facing tight margins, who'd just like some additional help.
I know of a number of small business operators throughout the country who would love to hire a first employee, or additional employees, but can't justify it due to the overhead and risk that is unnecessarily imposed by government.
I also know of businesses who had hired employees, but eventually had to let them go because the overhead and risk couldn't be justified any longer. Frequent and substantial minimum wage increases can really cause problems, for example, especially when margins are tight to begin with.
Many jobs in Canada are definitely being lost, or not created in the first place, all thanks to government-imposed overhead and risk that supposedly makes workers better off.
I will almost certainly never hire in Canada. The next company I start will be in Delaware.
More tax and regulation is a moat for larger organizations who can afford to deal with it.
If you look at places with easy firing, I think you’ll find they are growing extremely rapidly. Vietnam and China used to be the poster children for kids making sneakers and look at them grow today.
I was an economic powerhouse long before then.
The 1930's US stock market crash brought down the entire world!
As another point, it's not possible to make a ton of money selling weapons if you don't already have a thriving manufacturing sector. You have to at least be doing well to begin with.
According to [0], the US reached parity with the UK (probably the richest country in Europe at the time?) in terms of GDP per capita in 1880!
[0] https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...