The unofficial authority on recession calls in Canada says it’s too soon to use that word to describe the sluggish economy.
Debate has raged on Parliament Hill over whether the country is in a recession since Statistics Canada reported last week that the economy shrank for two quarters in a row.
The C.D. Howe Institute’s Business Cycle Council is traditionally viewed as the arbiter for calling a recession in Canada.
The council says in a bulletin Friday that two quarters of declining GDP in a row are not sufficient to call a recession and urges caution over reading too much into the recent data.
The group of economists argues weakness in Canada’s economy is not yet widespread or persistent enough to warrant the recession label, and the marginal decline in the first quarter of the year will be subject to revisions in the months ahead.
Over the past week, the Conservatives have laid the blame for a “full-blown recession” at the feet of the Liberal government, while Prime Minister Mark Carney argues growth will be uneven as the government tries to pivot the economy away from reliance on the United States.
The debate over whether this recession is ‘technical’ or ‘widespread’ misses the forest for the trees. While the C.D. Howe Institute and policymakers debate the semantics of lagging data, they continue to ignore the structural reality Canadians have lived since 2023. Headline GDP has been artificially propped up by historic population growth, masking a severe, multi-year decline in GDP per capita.
This institutional reluctance to label a recession is the economic equivalent of a child shoving a messy room into the closet and claiming it’s clean a bureaucratic ‘clean room’ illusion designed to keep the official narrative looking tidy while the door bulges. Relying on arbitrary definitions and the promise of ‘future data revisions’ to retroactively tell citizens how they used to feel is not economic stewardship; it is administrative inertia.
You cannot revise away the fact that individual purchasing power has been shrinking for nearly three years. If it walks like a recession and talks like a recession, waiting for a council of economists to give it a formal label is just administrative semantics. The average Canadian hasn’t been waiting for a 2026 announcement to know the economy has been in a downturn!
Lmao
The spinning never stops
And the lame liberal deflection continues.
You know how there’s this organization called the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development? Well, they know Canada is in a recession because part of the international cooperation revolves around consensus for things like: how do we define a recession.
But, it seems like Liberals, despite knowing otherwise, would rather deny and deflect and not acknowledge that we are in a recession giving rise to concerns that the Liberal Party and Mark Carney will fail to address the problem they refuse to acknowledge exists.
And here I am in Vancouver aka the most expensive city in western Canada and I just can’t stop making money. Weird
It was the Trudeau Liberals, with Carney advising them, who created the “technical” in technical recession. Because Canada was constantly meeting the definition of a recession they changed it to appear as if we weren’t quite in a recession. Typical Liberal smoke and mirrors.
DEI appointed liberals telling us not to worry? Hilarious! Meanwhile, the LPC continues to push investments south of the 49th. 11 years and counting.
I’m in a “technical” pregnancy, mom
Perhaps readers are familiar with the sentiment that If you cannot acknowledge that a problem exists, you cannot fix or solve it. Maybe? Sound familiar?
We are in a textbook recession. Mark Carney knows it, our trading partners know it, all economists know it. It is written in thousands of economics texts published by knowledgeable and respected economists and translated into multiple languages.
Stop the deflection and acknowledge the problem and do everything in your power to fix it.
Liberals claim to have elected a superior candidate in that he was a deeply knowledgeable economist over a career politician. So far, he has done little but prove that he will throw away everything he believes in and knows to be true for political expediency.