To hear Prime Minister Trudeau and Finance Minister Freeland tell it, everything is rosy with Canada’s economy. Indeed, Minister Freeland recently said Canada is “ready, as a country, to come roaring back.” That’s good rhetoric, but what about the facts? As 2021 ends, here are a few year-end facts Canadians should understand.
For starters, the government forecasts inflation-adjusted economic growth at 4.0 per cent in 2022, 2.1 per cent in 2023, 1.9 per cent in 2024 and 1.8 per cent in 2025. That’s not exactly “roaring back”—more like a positive bump followed by a fizzle.
And in fact, the Canadian economy has been underperforming for more than a decade. A recent study by Philip Cross, former chief analyst at Statistics Canada, found that economic growth has been lower over the past 10 years than in any decade since the 1930s. Before COVID, Canada ranked near the bottom among advanced countries (30th out of 38) on average economic growth from 2015 to 2019.
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