A diagnosis, assembled the slow way: every complaint traced down through its recorded causes until the chart bottoms out.
Chart in preparationSomething is wrong with Canada, and everyone can point at a piece of it — the housing, the waits, the disorder, the emigration. This project is an attempt to chart the whole patient: a causal graph in which every link is a claim, every claim carries its source, and the diagnosis is whatever the chart converges on rather than whatever was assumed going in.
The patient has arrived at the hospital. The chart is still being written.
Every node in the chart is one of three things:
The headline complaint — "everything costs too much" — which is a true symptom but hardly a diagnosis.Recorded causes — 6
Cost of Living is caused by Interprovincial Trade Barriers and 5 other recorded causes:
Friction, fees, and regulations make trade between provinces more difficult. Because of these barriers, every price starts higher than it would otherwise be, even before any provincial or federal taxes are added — a study in 2016 estimated the impact at cash registers as 7.8–14.5% higher prices (Albrecht & Tombe 2016), and the IMF measured the impact as equivalent to a ~21% tariff between provinces (IMF 2019, on 2015 data).
Interprovincial Trade Barriers is caused by Canada’s Federalism Design (and 1 other) — we’ve found a root cause:
Thirteen separate regulatory regimes means thirteen versions of every rule — friction and disunity are built into the structure itself. Even the repairs inherit it: seven provinces have begun building mutual-recognition regimes for trades licensing, yet the CFIB finds them taking seven different approaches — a spread of patchwork agreements applying only to ‘reciprocating jurisdictions’ that “could result in 196 separate agreements – an overly complex and inefficient approach” (CFIB, 2025).
The constitutional division of powers that places occupational and professional regulation with the provinces.
13 of 86 nodes trace down to here — 15% of everything on file.
N.B. — The chart does not yet prescribe any policy for any problem it identifies. Prescription is out of reach until the diagnosis is comprehensive.
No Root node was chosen in advance. Every recorded cause points somewhere, and when many separate complaints or conditions trace down to the same deeper cause, a Root node is revealed. They are ranked according to how many causal claims converge down upon them; as sources are added, rankings may change.
Convergence per root · nodes draining into each
The last row is the one you cannot act on: global forces Canada merely also experiences, counted together. It is here for scale — to show how much of the chart is not explained from outside. This situation is our problem, and we have to be honest about it to fix it.
Corrections, sources, and objections are welcome.
contact@canadiandisease.ca
The working chart is open. Start from any complaint and descend: every recorded cause, the justification behind it, and whether that claim is sourced or still owed — as far down as the record goes.