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'Out of Nowhere' Canadians Are Now Poorer Than Alabamians. The Reactions Have Been Pretty Funny

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  February 21, 2026 12:30 PM

Our northern neighbors are shell-shocked: they are even poorer than Alabamians. This follows a tough week for Canada, which has struggled at the Winter Olympics and has faced constant pressure from Donald Trump. In fact, it's the headline used on social media that's become the main source of mockery—"Out of nowhere, Canada became poorer than Alabama. How is that possible?”

In December, Tommy Battle’s dream came true. The five-term Mayor of Huntsville is Alabama to the bone, born in Birmingham and a graduate of the state university in Tuscaloosa, but for the past 18 years he’s tried to distance his city from the state’s unsavoury stereotypes. 

Huntsville, in the north, is the home of the Saturn rocket program that took on the Soviet Union’s Sputnik. It houses the second-largest biotech research hub in the United States. And it has attracted high-end manufacturing investments such as Blue Origin’s rocket engine plant. 

But Alabama tropes are hard to shake: The state is backward and full of bible thumpers and bigots – allegedly. When local companies try to hire from afar, Mayor Battle says recruits often hear the same responses when telling their spouses: “‘Huntsville?’ With one question mark. Then they say, ‘Alabama???’ With three question marks.” 

Translation: You’ve got to be kidding me. 

But in December, Huntsville had the last laugh. Eli Lilly and Co. was looking to build a US$6-billion manufacturing plant that would create 3,000 construction jobs and employ 450 engineers, scientists, lab technicians and operations staff. After narrowing down the field of 300 bidders, the pharmaceutical giant named Huntsville a winner, one of four new facilities in the U.S. It’s the state’s largest-ever private industrial investment, and it personifies the tagline the Mayor has preached: “Huntsville: a smart place.”

For eons, Canadians have viewed Alabama as a small state that, save for a few pockets, is dirt poor. All anybody seems to know about Alabama is that Montgomery and Birmingham were the centre of the civil rights movement. In 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he called Birmingham “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”

So, it was a shock when Canadian economist Trevor Tombe and the International Monetary Fund ran the numbers in 2023 and 2024 and concluded that Canada had, in fact, become poorer than Alabama. 

It’s the “out of nowhere” part that has people rolling their eyes: