The whole country is a gigantic house of cards propped up by real estate, with horrible service quality, terrible healthcare, no jobs, ZERO innovation, risk taking and entrepreneurship.
Having lived and travelled extensively, most Canadians want a house somewhere in the woods instead of doing something meaningful with their lives or try and innovate to build something.
All of this is propped up by rampant levels of immigration from China and India. Where US got the best talent from India, Canada got the worst, the ones who scam their way here and take the lowest level jobs.
Now all of this is coming home to roost. The next decade will be Canada's worst and if they do not learn that risk taking and entrepreneurship is the only way out of the mess they find themselves in, they will become a third world country in another decade.
That’s quite the statement, I assume you have quite the source for it.
The price-to-rent ratio isn’t that far off from the US, for example.
it's funny to see dozens of examples of european castles (buildings with tens of rooms and bathrooms, plus huge gardens) whose cost is in the same ballpark as 2 or 3 bedroom houses in random (but well [sub]urbanized) parts of Canada
Castles are a bit of a scam. The old aristocratic families that still own them, e.g. in Germany, tend to have a state subsidy for maintainance. If you didn't have the luck of being born into those families, you get all of the joys of Medieval engineering twinned to modern historic preservation bureuacracy.