Isn't most of Canada just a snowy wasteland
India has four times the population of the US. Yet the economic output is no where comparable.
More important than masses is quality trained population. Human ingenuity and talent can't be matched through scale.
The new super powers are way more likely to be China and India, as their huge populations go through the generational shift of people moving out of the lower class into the middle class.
Huge populations means nothing in the context of India. Unfortunately our politicians have repeated this tripe enough number of times to make it look like its some kind of inevitable economic dividend which we will reap.
The only known purpose masses of population have in a knowledge driven era like we live in is to compete with machine automation as meat robots, until the machine automation gets cheaper.
Beyond this having a huge population without good education, training and lack of a general progressive culture is a net negative. To sustain these people you get a huge defense bill and a range of social security spending thatlargely taxes productive people in a disproportionate way.
You also have to deal with a huge population scale with weird political and religious beliefs. Its a net negative.
At a rate of growth of 7%, from which India was not far off in the last 10 years, your economy doubles in 10 years. Let's say that it's a bit slower and it takes 12 years. This still means that India will double its economy by 2030. And unless they mess it up really badly their growth should keep going. Following more or less the Chinese model of using their huge scale to draw foreign investment.
This process has been gradually unfolding over the past two decades, as we invite foreign direct investments and do away with many pointless regulations.
This sort of a growth has a upper limit which will be breached sooner or later.
a) not proven scientifically
b) around the point where Mexico or Brazil are (Mexico: $10k GDP per capita, Brazil: $8k, India: $2k)
India just by reaching Brazil's level can still grow its economy 4 times or more. At that point its economy would be something like 80% of the US one, based on sheer population volume.
And this is only one scenario, one where they fall into this "middle income trap".
The U.S. still has ten times our population. With a population of just over 35 million, Canada is the world's 38th most populous country. That's a little over two Mumbai's. Perhaps Canada will become more influential in the years to come, but a superpower?
If you were simply referring to education, again, Canada is unlikely to compete with the U.S.'s ivy league in the near future. Our universities have higher standards than U.S. universities on average, but we lack both low-end crapiversities and truly elite institutions that can generate the kind of funding a U.S. ivy league university can. If you can't make it into the ivy league than a Canadian university is a great option, but if you can...
Our government isn't investing significantly more than the U.S. on research on a per capita basis, so the bulk of grant money in North America is still in the U.S.. Also, our tech sector is sluggish and poorly paid as compared to that of the U.S.. Lots of people like the idea of moving from the U.S. to Canada... until they find out they'll be making half as much for the same work!
No, Canada isn't poised to become a superpower anytime soon. The best we can hope for is improvement. We're going to see a lot of articles like this from U.S. authors because they're really not happy with their politics right now, nor should they be. However, the reality is that Canada is still a bit of a backwater. We're North America's Sweden. A nice place to live, but too small to really make a huge impact.