[Doctorfever]

Originally Posted by belsarius

Since 2020 GDP growth among the G7 nations have been

USA 37%
Canada 33%
UK 33%
Italy 25%
France 20%
Germany 20%
Japan -19%

So yes, while our GDP/capita has been lagging behind due to the drastic increase in population through the Liberal immigration policies, GDP growth as a whole has only lagged behind the US, which I would argue is not a peer as much as the rest of the countries are.

I think that puts us in pretty safe territory in being very comparable to our peers, not lagging behind at all.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ry-gdp-levels/

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.

The statistics you posted are misleading when they don’t account for population growth. As pointed out, one country could have a 1% population increase while another could have a 25% population increase over a given period of time.

Canada has had a very poor record compared to peer countries. You don’t even have to compare us to the US (they are way, way ahead of us).