Toronto, June 18, 2012 – With a balance of economic prosperity and civic harmony, Canada is the envy of most countries around the world. But a new book warns that Canadians cannot be complacent as the country’s high paying jobs, world-class learning and research institutes, excellent health care, and social safety nets exist only to the extent that Canada is innovative and competitive globally.
Canada: What It Is, What It Can Be, published by Rotman-UTP Publishing, an imprint of University of Toronto Press in partnership with the Rotman School of Management, provides an incisive examination of Canada’s increasing prosperity gap – the difference in value between what we do create and what we could create if we performed at our full potential. It calls for the country to take ground-breaking new approaches to ensure Canada will continue to be an economic leader in the coming decades.
Written by Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School, and James Milway, the book builds on their work of more than a decade at the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity, which supports the Ontario government’s Taskforce on Competitiveness, Productivity and Economic Progress.
“Competitiveness and prosperity are the watchwords of a country’s ability to thrive in the global economy. As globalization embraces many more countries, Canada cannot be complacent about the challenges to its position as one of the world’s most prosperous economies,” says Martin.
“While we can be proud of our current prosperity, Canadians do not participate as aggressively in world markets with innovative products and services as we could. Our business strategies and economic policies need to set the bar higher to achieve the success we want for Canada,” adds Milway.
Canada: What It Is, What It Can Be has already been lauded as an important contribution to the public policy debate on competitiveness by Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney and Prof. Michael Porter of Harvard Business School.
Founded in 1901, the University of Toronto Press is Canada's oldest scholarly press and one of the largest university presses in North America, releasing over 150 new scholarly, reference, and general-interest books each year, as well as maintaining a backlist of over 1500 titles in print. For more information, visit http://www.utppublishing.com .