I am Canadian and am wary of investing in the stock market in Canada because the behaviour of our government is simply to follow in the footsteps of the previous Bush administration in the United States. The government deficit has recently gone back up to levels it was at in the 80's and 90's. The domestic economy is skewed toward scamming investors into buying resources that may or may not be accessible.  Following the US lead, housing prices somewhat collapsed and are mostly flat now.  Unemployment numbers are unreliable as the numbers do not really reflect the numbers of people out of work.  The city of Vancouver for instance has about 1200 homeless people but homeless people are not counted amongst the unemployed.<p>Our banking system is similar to the United States where the government borrows money as debt.  In Canada, the government borrows debt money from private Canadian chartered banks that create the money virtually out of thin air.  With the beauty of compound interest the government has paid out over $1.5 trillion dollars in interest alone.  Most of our deficit and spending goes towards merely making payments on the interest to the private banks.  Every government in the world could pay off their debt in an instant by creating debt free money out of thin air.  The Bank of Canada has this power, but the Canadian government chooses to create money as debt.