JD Vance picks some Canadian cherries

US Vice-President JD Vance felt the need to weigh in on Canada's standard of living on X the other day. While I have little to no confidence in JD Vance's critical thinking abilities - or anything else published on X, for that matter - his post merits comment for its sheer fatuity.

His comments are in response to a post by some other right-wing geezer who happened to get hold of a graph produced by Ice Cap Asset Management, an obscure but outspoken Nova Scotia investment portfolio management company, comparing Canada, UK and USA's inflation-adjusted GDP per capita.

Vance's conclusions (not necessarily Ice Cap's, although one of its analysts did publicly agree with them)?

While I'm sure the causes are complicated, no nation has leaned more into "diversity is our strength, we don't need a melting pot we have a salad bowl" immigration insanity than Canada.

It has the highest foreign-born share of the population in the entire G7 and its living standards have stagnated.

Whew! Where to start.

Ignoring entirely the complicated causes he mentions, Vance plucks a "cause" out of thin air. Immigration = Poorer Standard of Living. Obvious, right? No evidence, or even logic, needed.

And, hold on, since when did GDP per capita become the sole measure of standard of living? A country's standard of living is usually tracked using a much wider range of data. For example the UN uses a Human Development Index, which combines GDP per capita, life expectancy at birth, and years of schooling for children. This index shows Canada pretty much in lockstep with the US and UK.

In terms of "quality of life", which includes such factors as access to food, housing, quality education, healthcare, employment, etc, Canada does much better than either the UK or US. 

So, it really depends on which statistics you want to cherry-pick. But the chutzpah of the Trump administration seems to know no bounds. Put out some vaguely cconvincing-sounding cherry-picked data and the party faithful will lap it up, and even expand on it some. No need for accountability or accuracy or any of that crap; they are past all that. And, soon enough, that cherry-picked, even blatantly erronious, data becomes the conventional wisdom. Voilà. Job done.