Tim Kiladze: What Alabama Can Teach Canada and Britain

Tim Kiladze is a financial reporter and columnist at the Globe and Mail. His recent long-form feature — "Out of nowhere, Canada became poorer than Alabama" — went viral with over five million views on X and triggered a debate about Canadian competitiveness. Tim joined us to walk through what he actually found on the ground in Alabama, why the piece touched a nerve, and what Canada and the UK should take from it.

What We Covered

Tim explains why the piece almost didn't happen — the Canada-Alabama GDP comparison first circulated in 2024, then got buried by the trade war and federal election. He'd always wondered whether the stat was real, pitched the story, and the editors sent him south.

What he found in Huntsville didn't match any Canadian stereotype of Alabama. The city sits in the foothills of the Appalachians, looks like Vermont from the mayor's office, and the dominant car in the biotech research park parking lot was a Subaru Outback. Mayor Tommy Battle, a real estate guy turned politician, has spent years rebranding the city as "Huntsville: a smart place" — complete with lapel pins.

Tim walks through Alabama's economic transformation, starting with Mercedes-Benz arriving in 1993 and triggering a cascade of auto manufacturers — Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, Toyota — that now produce nearly as many vehicles as Ontario. He met Greg Canfield, the state's former commerce secretary, who candidly acknowledged that Alabama's early tax incentives were unsustainably generous and had to be reformed. The key insight from Canfield: speed to market matters more than anything. Companies putting capital at risk want to earn it back fast, and Alabama let them build quickly.

That led to a discussion about Canada's regulatory environment. Joseph flagged the Enbridge pipeline refusal — the same week the piece came out, Enbridge said it wouldn't participate in the proposed Alberta-to-Pacific pipeline. Tim went further, noting that even people involved with major Canadian projects told him privately, in the last couple of weeks, that they don't know if their projects will get built. The variable nobody talks about enough, he said, is the courts — duty to consult rulings, judicial reviews, and First Nations groups that have learned to use legal processes to slow or stop development.

Andrew drew parallels to the regeneration of Greenville, South Carolina and northwestern Arkansas, and raised a critical constraint: the bond markets. The US can run a nearly $2 trillion annual deficit because of the dollar's reserve status. Canada and the UK simply can't play that game — as Britain learned during the Liz Truss mini-budget. Andrew also pushed back on the idea that southern US strategies are directly transferable, noting that lower union protections, weaker worker rights, and minimal safety nets are politically unacceptable in the UK and Canada regardless of which party is in power.

Tim acknowledged all of this but kept returning to a central point: Canada hides behind its morals. Public healthcare and public education are things he firmly believes in — but his kids' school in Toronto looks like a bomb shelter, and when he tried to get a wall painted through the parent council, he hit union rules and red tape. The healthcare system has the same problem: COVID exposed that the bottleneck was nurses and ICU beds, and years later, the nursing crisis persists.

The conversation closed on the question of what's actually learnable. Tim's answer: use tax policy selectively, build a brand again, and stop expecting investment to come to us. Andrew's answer: get past the reflexive anti-Americanism that prevents honest assessment of what's working south of the border.