Curtis: Who faces greater challenges to reform, the Xi-Li or the Obama administration?

By: /
12 November, 2012
By: John Curtis
Adjunct Professor at Queen's University and Chair of Statistics Canada's Advisory Committee on International Trade Statistics

Xi-Li would appear to have greater challenges: more domestic growth, improve the social security net, climate change requirements, unbalanced demographics (male-female, aging), accommodation of minorities, reform of SOEs, regional foreign policy issues, global foreign policy (especially vis-a-vis the other superpower, the U.S.), never mind maintaining balance with the many factions of the CCP. President Obama, on the other hand, has a well-established institutional structure to support him – his most difficult immediate challenge being overcoming the “fiscal cliff” and in the longer term improving education and health outcomes as well as infrastructure.

Before you click away, we’d like to ask you for a favour … 

Journalism in Canada has suffered a devastating decline over the last two decades. Dozens of newspapers and outlets have shuttered. Remaining newsrooms are smaller. Nowhere is this erosion more acute than in the coverage of foreign policy and international news. It’s expensive, and Canadians, oceans away from most international upheavals, pay the outside world comparatively little attention.

At Open Canada, we believe this must change. If anything, the pandemic has taught us we can’t afford to ignore the changing world. What’s more, we believe, most Canadians don’t want to. Many of us, after all, come from somewhere else and have connections that reach around the world.

Our mission is to build a conversation that involves everyone — not just politicians, academics and policy makers. We need your help to do so. Your support helps us find stories and pay writers to tell them. It helps us grow that conversation. It helps us encourage more Canadians to play an active role in shaping our country’s place in the world.

Become a Supporter