[Doctorfever]

Moving this discussion from the tariff thread because it has more to do with Canadian politics as opposed to tariffs.

Originally Posted by Fuzz

None of those people are pointing to Canada being broken. That's just more narrative you have heard or crafted. All countries have economic challenges, self made and external. We haven't been struggling for a long time. And I'm not sure company name recognition on a stock index tells anyone anything about anything. Is that an official metric I can lookup and bet on Polymarket?

What do you mean by "swallowed up economically"? Is that a traditional fear, or something new because an insane orange goblin took over the worlds largest economy and is swinging it around erratically like a rotten fruit bat? That's not something anyone in Canada ever expected to prepare for.

The reality is the US is our biggest trading partner because that's the reality of capitalism. Proximity to market. I couldn't imagine the outrage if we had a willing US, and we chose to only trade with distant countries which meant limited quantities, higher costs and lower profits while the worlds biggest market sat un-served, because we wanted to be diverse. You can force this stuff if you really believe it, but that chases companies away and our GDP and productivity would dive. Yes, we may have to do that now, but it's utter silliness to pretend that these are things we should have forced into existence in the before times.

Here's a good summary of where we are at, and it sure doesn't look like the Canada has been broken for years description you are peddling. :
https://www.international.gc.ca/trad....aspx?lang=eng

I would say that what you have posted is not a good summary of where we are at. I’m sure those numbers are correct, but at the same time they can be misleading because they don’t tell the whole story.

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/comm...e-ottawas-spin

Growth in gross domestic product (GDP), the total value of all goods and services produced in the economy annually, is one of the most frequently cited indicators of Canada’s economic performance. Journalists, politicians and analysts often compare various measures of Canada’s total GDP growth to other countries, or to Canada’s past performance, to assess the health of the economy and living standards. However, this statistic is misleading as a measure of living standards when population growth rates vary greatly across countries or over time.

Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, for example, recently boasted that Canada had experienced the “strongest economic growth in the G7” in 2022. Although the Trudeau government often uses international comparisons on aggregate GDP growth as evidence of economic success, it’s not the first to do so. In 2015, then-prime minister Stephen Harper said Canada’s GDP growth was “head and shoulders above all our G7 partners over the long term.”

Unfortunately, such statements do more to obscure public understanding of Canada’s economic performance than enlighten it. In reality, aggregate GDP growth statistics are not driven by productivity improvements and do not reflect rising living standards. Instead, they’re primarily the result of differences in population and labour force growth. In other words, they aren’t primarily the result of Canadians becoming better at producing goods and services (i.e. productivity) and thus generating more income for their families. Instead, they primarily reflect the fact that there are simply more people working, which increases the total amount of goods and services produced but doesn’t necessarily translate into increased living standards.

Let’s look at the numbers. Canada’s annual average GDP growth (with no adjustment for population) from 2000 to 2023 was the second-highest in the G7 at 1.8 per cent, just behind the United States at 1.9 per cent. That sounds good, until you make a simple adjustment for population changes by comparing GDP per person. Then a completely different story emerges.

Canada’s inflation-adjusted per-person annual economic growth rate (0.7 per cent) is meaningfully worse than the G7 average (1.0 per cent) over this same period. The gap with the U.S. (1.2 per cent) is even larger. Only Italy performed worse than Canada.

Why the inversion of results from good to bad? Because Canada has had by far the fastest population growth rate in the G7, growing at an annualized rate of 1.1 per cent—more than twice the annual population growth rate of the G7 as a whole at 0.5 per cent. In aggregate, Canada’s population increased by 29.8 per cent during this time period compared to just 11.5 per cent in the entire G7.

That is a decent summary as to why you need to account for population growth when discussing GDP. It makes sense when you have much different population growth between different countries.


This CBC article also highlights some of The issues with Canada economic growth.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/can...rich-1.7318989

Canada is among the richest countries in the world — but when compared to peer countries like Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, it isn't as rich as it once was.

And the wealth gap between Canada and the U.S. has only grown wider, according to figures published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Canada's relatively weak economic growth, combined with a population boom, has hit its standing among wealthy countries.

It's one reason why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has turned to former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney to give him and his cabinet advice on how to juice economic growth.

Treasury Board President Anita Anand is also launching what she calls a "working group" to study the country's lacklustre productivity and find ways to boost economic output.

The Bank of Canada is also seized with the issue. In March, Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers sounded the alarm about the need to boost Canada's productivity.

Here you even have the Liberal party and the Bank of Canada sounding alarms on our economy. There are definitely severe issues with our economic growth, even the Liberal party agrees with that.