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by olalonde 5 hours ago
According to the central bank, the country is "not clearly in a recession"[0].

[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/11897931/bank-of-canada-rate-anno...

1 comments

I'm skeptical of central bankers trying to sugarcoat the fact that we are in a "technical" recession. If you look at per-capita GDP it's lower than it was four years ago and if you talk to regular Canadians you'll come away feeling like we've been in a recession for years. I would say per-capita is a better metric because it better reflects what individuals are experiencing, whereas Canada's overall GDP has been bolstered by high immigration targets for years. Regardless, it meets the definition of a recession and matches with the experiences of many Canadians. I'm sure the beureocrats and central bankers aren't feeling that pain though.
Why did you casually jump to per capita GDP? Per capita GDP is finally going up after a long regression, and one of the reasons Canada slipped to a very small recession is that hundreds of thousands of migrants are leaving the country, their visas expired. When you remove a lot of people that were consuming housing and food and cell plans and delivery doordash, GDP drops.

You have two conflicting complaints simultaneously, and you should make up your mind. Were you happy when Canada's GDP was increasing courtesy of mass migration?

So are you happy with the changes? I'm super happy with it. I'm also quite pleased with how well Canada has weathered a criminal felon pedo that has tried his hardest to hurt us, many Americans blissfully oblivious.

And yup, the many tentacles are government are going to keep making laws and planning trains and doing pipeline projects and countless other programs -- they aren't restricted to whatever the imaginary pet is of a particular complainer -- and amazingly they can competently do all of this simultaneously! Not always in a way that everyone agrees with, though.

Per-capita GDP rose mainly because of what you said, declining immigration growth.

The issue is that our economy has been in decline for years, increasing the population dramatically masked that at, least in nominal GDP, and as population growth declines it reveals the weaknesses that were previously obscured. Simply reducing population growth is not enough to fix the last 10 years. Immigration was and is never the problem with our economy, a lack of real growth is.

So no, I wasn't happy when our GDP rose because of population growth, and I'm not happy today either because pulling a few levers on the immigration machine to change the numbers slightly doesn't fix anything. And it doesn't appear like the government is doing anything to fix it, instead focusing on the stuff we're talking about in this thread.

>The issue is that our economy has been in decline for years

Yup. We had a housing and immigration based economy.

>Simply reducing population growth is not enough to fix the last 10 years.

Ah, so damned if they do, damned if they don't. Yes, getting unchecked immigration under control was absolutely a problem that needed to be fixed (they still aren't there, and the TFW and "student" pipelines are a major remaining problem), and it was a contributor to our economy getting untethered.

>And it doesn't appear like the government is doing anything to fix it, instead focusing on the stuff we're talking about in this thread.

C-22 is a tiny, minor, law and justice bill that normal wouldn't get an iota of attention (it legitimately is a tiny, extremely simple bill). You think the government is "focusing" on this? Then you have zero idea how anything works. Pretending like the massive arms of government focused on this is necessary for your rhetoric though.

Further, saying they aren't doing anything else...yes, you are 100% a partisan. Nothing will please you. Everything is wrong. Everything is dire. But I'm sure only Saviour Party will fix things.

And it's funny that there are dipshits in here pretending like I'm the partisan. I hate this sort of dipshit politics on either side. When Harper was PM and the far left was apocalyptic about everything he did (doing the same incredibly stupid "everything is going to hell!" routine), it was just as profoundly stupid. I hate when both sides do this nonsense.

I’m not sure why you’re so eager to blame immigration for the economy doing poorly. Cutting immigration only makes the economy worse unless you offset that by creating growth elsewhere, which hasn’t seemed to happen in the last 10 years, nor the last ~350 days.

C-22 is not a tiny, minor thing. It has massive repercussions for people’s privacy and security, as well as for the economy. If it was some minor thing, why so much effort to push it through despite immense backlash? It’s clearly a top priority for the government for some reason.

The liberals were literally reelected on the basis that Mark Carney is a master economist and he is our only saviour against Trump.