Canada’s Lost Decade Continues

Statistics Canada is irrepressible

I confess a grudging respect for the staff at Statistics Canada.

Government statisticians in the United States routinely fudge economic data to try to make Joe Biden look good - only to downwardly revise those numbers month after month when they think no one is looking.

StatsCan clearly has more integrity than that. When there’s an elephant in the middle of the room, they feel compelled to talk about it. Though they’re not brazen enough to overtly display ugly numbers they know Justin Trudeau doesn’t want you to see, they do leave those numbers where anyone willing to look can find them.

Take this latest StatsCan Report. Gross domestic product is the single most common statistic used to measure a country’s economic performance. I think it is a less-than-useful statistic at the best of times, but it is particularly misleading when immigration and inflation are both high. At those times, it is far more accurate to measure GDP per person, and measure it in inflation-adjusted dollars.

This article does that, and graphs the result:

The authors try hard to put lipstick on a pig - after all, just releasing a graph like this probably puts their jobs at risk. They admit that growth has been below the long-term trend in recent years, but argue that all that’s needed is “an average growth rate of 1.7% per year to get back to trend in ten years.”

But one has only to look at the graph to see that things that real GDP per capita in 2014 was almost the same as at the end of 2023. They don’t put the damning numbers directly into the article - that would make it too easy - but if you click on the link “Data Table for Chart 1” you’ll find the following ugly truth.

Real GDP per capita was marginally higher in the fourth quarter of 2014 than it was in the final quarter of 2023. ($58,162 vs $58,111)

In other words, the prosperity of Canadians has not increased one iota in the past nine years. We’ve seen zero net growth since Stephen Harper’s last year as Prime Minister. Nada. Zilch.

With much of Europe already in recession, and the US now headed that way, it’s a good bet that real GPD per capita in Canada at the end 2024 will be lower than it was ten years ago. If that happens, the Trudeau years will end up being remembered as a lost decade for Canada.

Japan’s “lost decade”, in addition to a similar kind of economic stagnation, saw a crash in both the stock market and real estate values. That hasn’t happened in Canada yet. (It could still happen!)

Even saying that the Canadian economy has flat-lined for nine years is probably being too generous. After all, StatsCan also tells us that Canada’s Federal Debt almost doubled over the past nine years, rising by 582 billion dollars. Put another way, the Canadian Federal Government has borrowed $14,500 from your children and grandchildren on your behalf over the past nine years - as they did for every Canadian - to try to make the economy appear less bad than it was.

StatsCan also tells us that, during those nine years, Canadians increased their total mortgage debt from $1,241 billion to $2,158 billion, Non-mortgage loans rose from $630 billion to $752 billion, Personal loans rose from $93 billion to $125 billion, and credit card debt rose from $77 billion to $105 billion. Just to tread water, Canadians individually also had to borrow from the future.

(You can see what I mean about StatsCan’s gutsiness in being willing to release data that makes the current Government look bad.)

I’ll grant you that Statistics Canada didn’t shout from the rooftops than Canadians’ real per capita income is no greater today than it was nine years ago. But it’s not as though they made it hard to find that information. Any journalist worth their salt should have found it.

This should be a major story, all over the news. If they still had journalists working at the CBC, I’m sure it would be.

As it is, the Canada’s bought-and-paid-for mainstream media will need a certain amount of nudging before they will be willing to report this important story. Please nudge them in any way you can.