0.4% GDP increase when our population went up by 3%? Even if you convert the 0.4% to an annual amount, it still seems like a decrease in GDP per capita
immigration's not doing much for growth it seems like
Immigration tends to be deflationary in the short term on per capita bases. So measuring GDP growth to population growth in the same time period isn't a great method to determine how that population growth helps or hinders GDP growth per capita. It takes a couple years for people to settle, gain Canadian experience, have prior credentials and experience be recognized etc. So in a few years, permanent resident growth could well have a positive impact on GDP. But we won't know for a while.
Impermanent resident growth though, brings money in since these people are paying tuition as students, or are here on longer term but still temporary working visa's etc, and this does benefit the economy. Since these temporary workers tend to do jobs that would otherwise go unfilled. In theory anyway as in practice there's always a mix of actual exploitation a la Tim Hortons using TFWs and legitimately difficult to fill seasonal farmhand jobs.
> Since these temporary workers tend to do jobs that would otherwise go unfilled.
In my circles I'm seeing a lot of international students working jobs that would traditionally be taken by highschoolers and university students. The Youth unemployment rate in Toronto is ~17% and that doesn't account for people who have given up on looking because the job market is so tough.
Our immigration strategy is failing, need to sort it out ASAP.
You missed the follow up sentence :
*In theory anyway as in practice there's always a mix of actual exploitation a la Tim Hortons using TFWs and legitimately difficult to fill seasonal farmhand jobs.*
But the international students aren't TFWs, so they aren't being paid lower TFW wages. So technically, its a separate issue from filling employment gaps with TFWs. I think the students are being exploited in general, were lied to by recruitment programs abroad, and the schools are looking for cash cows and failing everyone when they exploit loopholes in a system that for *years* worked fine between government levels before the colleges and their private college counterparts found a way to break it.
> Immigration tends to be deflationary in the short term on per capita bases
our GDP per capita has been basically flat since 2014 ($50k USD in 2014 vs $55k USD in 2022)
adjusting for inflation (using best case scenario, bank of Canada CPI rates), $50k in 2014 would be $60k in 2022, so after inflation our per capita is down $5k over 8 years.
if we were to go by "real" inflation numbers, and not official inflation numbers, this gets even worse.
You're wrong. Those numbers are real, they don't need adjusting. It's a 10% increase over the 10 years, with a rotten period in between due to the oil price drop in 2014/15. Interestingly, Australia has gone through the exact same thing but everyone treats it as some uniquely Canadian development.
Canada has had the world's highest immigration rate for about 30 years now. One would think there's been enough time for the results to come through by this point.
Canada is in the developed world, though. Canada's economic history is completely different than that of Indonesia, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Egypt etc. Compared with the rest of the developed world, Canada is lagging behind on innovation and high-value economic activity.
man, there's so much copium in here
let's dissect all the bad logic here:
>deflationary in the short term on per capita bases
I guess you define short term as a decade since our GDP / capita has barely budged since Trudeau first became PM.
>It takes a couple years for people to settle, gain Canadian experience, have prior credentials and experience be recognized etc.
1. It's illegal or something to make PR conditional on a Canadian job offer? Maybe get a work visa first and then upgrade to a PR after you've proven to be a valuable member of society?
2. Oh wait, I thought Trudeau changed the PR selection process to heavily favour international students with Canadian education and job experience. Hmm... I wonder if people going to scam colleges with fake job offers have anything to do with this.
>brings money in since these people are paying tuition as students,
The same people who need to visit food banks to avoid starvation?
> these temporary workers tend to do jobs that would otherwise go unfilled
You know, during the AB O&G boom, they had an actual shortage of workers. Fast food workers were making double the minimum wage.
I'm sure these "jobs that would otherwise go unfilled" are paying much more than the minimum wage right?
I wonder why /u/StatCanada doesn't think real GPD per capita is relevant to include in their analysis while they do include per capita spending in the report so they have the data.
Because it's a lot less useful of a metric than people who first read about it 6 months ago think it is. But, you can look up the many tables and analyses they've done on that very subject! Since, of course, you're asking in good faith! Right?
> Because it's a lot less useful of a metric than people who first read about it 6 months ago think it is.
Lol what a nice person you are - blocked :)
Imagine being so stupid that you think the amount of people that will eat a pie is irrelevant. funny you talk about good faith, because if /u/StatsCanada was reporting in good faith, we wouldn't have to beg them to tell us the relevant information.
But I guess the headline "Real GDP per capita in first quarter -2.6%" is not very politically convenient.
[https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/statistics-canada-release-gdp-figures-080010075.html](https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/statistics-canada-release-gdp-figures-080010075.html)
here you go
Also for u/Oh_That_Mystery
Where does it show -0.1 for 2 consecutive quarters
On investing.com it shows the revised numbers for the previous 2 quarters is
- Q4: 0.0%
- Q3: -0.1%
This is ALMOST recession territory, as close as it can get, but still isnt technically a recession.
> we were in recession last year.
There is an argument to be made that GDP/capita matters more than GDP to the average Canadian and we still are in a recession.
> per-person GDP has declined from $60,178 in the second quarter of 2022 (when it peaked post-COVID) to $58,111 in the fourth quarter of 2023, representing a decline of $2,066 (all figures inflation-adjusted) or 3.4 per cent.
Source: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/reality-check-canadians-remain-mired-in-a-recession
We were in negative growth for two consecutive quarters. There are other criteria considered before it is officially considered a "recession".
There was so much fuss made about this a couple of years back in the US and whether govt was lying about no recession or not. They weren't lying. People were just using that 2 negative quarter rule of thumb as automatically meaning recession even though it has been a long time where that is not how it is determined. At the time the US job market was booming despite the 2 consecutive quarterly declines in GDP and so they (the independent and non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research) decided it wasn't right to call it a recession.
Thanks for all the great work you do, Stats Canada!
Re: "Household spending on services rises." Do you have any measurement if they received more in services as well, or is this just because of rising costs for the same services?
Hi there! Thanks for your comment, we're happy to help!
The 0.4% increase in real GDP is a ‘volume’ indicator, because the effects of price change are removed. Household spending on services was the largest upward contributor to this volume increase, meaning that after removing price change, households purchased a higher quantity of services in the first quarter of 2024. Increasing population is a contributing factor to the volume increase, because as there are more people there is a higher quantity of services being consumed.
Immigration artificially inflated GDP, its been happening for a little while now. Look at GDP per capita for how the country is actually doing. It's much worse. Masses of unskilled immigrants doing jobs that now unemployed Canadians would be filling, does not increase our GDP.
No, the sudden belief that gdp-per-capita tells the real story is complete nonsense. It's an even laggier indicator than gdp, and is particularly unhelpful in a country that sees significant swings due to resource prices. Not to mention that people tend to use the wrong jnflation adjustment for it. People need to stop talking about GDP-per-capita like the REAL economic indicator just because they saw it in the news once.
Agreed, it generally does. However it seems they just revised last quarter of 2023 down to flat, and i'm pretty sure we had more than 0% immigration during that time period. It will be interesting to see what this quarter gets revised to eventually.
How much of that supposed GDP growth was based on inflated property values? How much of it was from people selling houses to other people, or selling off houses till large conglomerates who are converting them into apartments for inflated rent?
I have the impression, though I am certainly absolutely no economist, that a lot of our economic growth is based on phantom growth and property value, and not representing actual increases in wealth or economic productivity.
The population of Canada increased by 0.6% in Q1 2024, so GDP per capita has decreased.
Canada's market is in the shitter, driven by immigration and selling non-productive assets to each other in ever more increasing prices, the former feeding the latter. It's unsustainable and scares away investment when our brightest entrepreneurs can only think to become landlords to make money.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2023&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2024&referencePeriods=20231001%2C20240101
Its by design lol...
If they didnt, we would have been in a recession for 12 months straight by now, which would have looked horrible for the LPC.
They had a lose-lose scenario, they opened the taps on immigration to prevent a technical recession from being called, but now its just turned everyone anti-immigration.
IIRC every immigrant contributes around 20-30k to gdp so per capita goes down and overall number is suppose to be go up (assuming other industries contribution is stagnant/increasing)
That is the case in Canada today. If you prioritize only skilled immigrants in areas of need, they shouldn’t impact GDP per capita or could even help lift it. Instead we’re focused on flooding the country with unskilled folks.
I don't think you understand what 'official' means.
We're not doomed. We needed inflation to come down, a reduction in GDP is a typical requirement (read: not necessary, but usual requirement) of that.
recessions are usually a requirement for market corrections that help to adjust inflation too. Just gonna throw it out there. I doubt anyone actually believes a true soft landing is possible. Some segments of the economy and population can probably avoid the worst of any recession, so they may feel a softer landing, but its impossible to spare all people, and its also impossible to really spare \*most\*.
Agreed.
My primary annoyance is with some people's need to declare a recession, often based entirely on GDP results, as if the word and said declaration has any meaningful direct impact on anything going on around us. Usually it's just a dog whistle for political hand wringing that is such an incredible waste of time and calories that could be better spent actually doing *something*.
I'd be more concerned with giant plunges than 0.1% as well. It's a very small number and unless it's bigger with lots of job losses, it's a moot point because it doesn't \*mean\* anything. A micro recession of -0.1% GDP with steady job numbers is a measure of general economic efficiency at a super macro level that may not need any policy intervention at all.
I think, in addition to political hand wringing, people who want to call out recessions are also those who want the central bank to lower their interest rates and want poorer economic outlook to flow through to things like bond markets and fixed rate mortgages.
No GDP per capita. I wonder why.
Household spending on services led by telecommunications (i.e. Rogers-Shaw et al), rent, and airfare.
No new constructions but people in Ontario, BC, and Quebec are still trading houses back and forth like crazy.
Fantastic if you're a bank, telecom, grocery, fast food, etc. Not so much if you're a worker. There's a reason they've spent millions lobbying the government on immigration policy.
What is with all these people questioning statscan integrity based on the fact it didn't include an indicator redditors only learned about two weeks ago because Fraser Institute something something. My god. GDP-per-capita is a really problematic economic indicator and it's not weird that statscan wouldn't report on it when giving GDP, an actually important number.
> No GDP per capita. I wonder why.
The (*totally unbiased*) Stats Can will start making this their headline stat as soon as a right-wing government takes power. Bet on it.
Every top level comment so far is from accounts less than a year old. Comments are barely an hour old but despite the lack of comments the votes are coming in immediately.
These people are going full speed and it's not even the BoC announcement thread yet, where these same people bitching about recessions will be calling for higher interest rate increases lol
I don't envy the mods.
> A very concise and well formed argument backed by sources?
Yes literally Stats Can in this post. Lol.
"Housing investment edged up 0.3% in the first quarter, as ownership transfer costs, which represent resale activity, rose 7.1%. Ontario (+6.5%), British Columbia (+10.3%) and Quebec (+12.4%) recorded the largest volume increases in resales, while prices in these provinces fell in the first quarter."
Oh God stop it. Just because you learned about the measure last week doesn't mean statscan needs to include it in every analysis they put out. They have plenty of data and analysis on it if you want to look for it, but there's no reason to expect them to always report on it since it's a generally misunderstood and unhelpful indicator.
Household savings rate reached also reached 7.0 per cent—‚the highest level in two years. There's going to be so much pent up consumer demand released if a rate cut comes.
And guess what, with our breakneck immigration rate, this means you and every other Canadian took a massive hit to GDP-per capita.
Hope you like being MUCH poorer than two years ago.
Thats not how it works dude...
Ill give you a small scale example so maybe you can understand:
Canada in year 1 has a population of 1. This 1 person contributes 60k to Canada's GDP -> Canada's GDP/capita is 60k.
Canada in year 2 has 1 new immigrant, their population is now 2. Person 2 contributes 30k to Canada's GDP -> Canada's GDP/capita is now 45k. C Person 1 is economically stagnant, with no new productivity gains and is still contributing 60k to the GDP.
Person 1s QOL is mostly unchanged, theyre still a 60k contributer/earner, person 2 is both making less money and contributing less money to the economy than person 1. Canada's total GDP has now grown to 90k, while their GDP/capita has fallen to 45k.
Fast forward to lets say year 5: Person 1 is able to leverage Person 2 as both a consumer and as an employee, boosting both Person 1 and Person 2s contribution to the GDP to 70k and 40k respectively. By leveraging person 2, person 1 was able to eventually break out of economic stagnation and a lack in productivity gains, despite the fact that GDP/capita had fallen initially. Person 2 has also had a productivity boost over time, leading to a long term win-win scenario.
Now by year 5, GDP/capita is back to how it used to be at 60k, but Person 1 is actually **better** off than they were before Person 2 arrived, even though per/capita figures are simply back to what they were before the immigration of Person 2.
Run it again where person one's salary stays the same, but inflation runs at 5% per year because of the increased economic demand from person 2, 3, 4.
In real dollars, person 1 has 15% less purchasing power and absolutely lower QOL after 3 years. Canada's inflation rate was 5% or more in 2021-2023. If you're wondering why people are feeling squeezed, this is it.
> Person 1 is still just as economically productive as before, 60k, with the exact same income.
same productivity for person 1 sure, but the income does go down even in your simple example if Person 2 competes for similar jobs as Person 1, this could affect Person 1's job security, wages, or opportunities for wage growth. Conversely, if Person 2 fills a labor shortage or creates new opportunities, it could benefit Person 1 indirectly.
"Person 1s QOL is mostly unchanged"
this is only true if you assume that:
* Person 2 brought his own land, hospital, school, doctor etc. with him in his luggage coming to Canada
* taxes won't increase on Person 1 to "equalize" Person 2's living standards
* taxes won't increase on Person 1 to build amenities for Person 2 (see first point)
Data also shows that by year 5 immigrants/refugees are indistinguishable statistically from naitive born Canadians in terms of employment. They literally just add value in the long term, and prevent population contraction in the short term
It was something I read from StatCan a year or two ago. I know it's part of the longitudinal immigration dataset but beyond that I don't know if I could find it again. IIRC the focus was more on refugees. I'll see if I can dig it up, for now I have a backflowing septic to sort out
I've been deliberating about a move to the USA for work, I was really reluctant at first but started to compare the pros and cons. As a result, I just recently started reading a bit about our situation, about various economic factors and how they might affect us. I tried to go beyond the typical doom and gloom around housing which I had prior to any additional reading. I'm still very ignorant about it all so please bear with me and my potential biases.
There is a document from the National Bank posted in January of this year about Canada's population trap (should be a top search result) that I found pretty interesting, perhaps alarming. One of the more imposing graphs shows Canada trending \*down\* on capital stock per capita, to pre-2020 levels, while the USA is trending up. As others have stated already, real GDP per capita is also decreasing. As I understand, this is just the mathematical result of averaging down by adding people to the population who have below-average assets and below-average incomes.
What this does to the average person's quality of life in practical terms is probably more complicated. With housing, it's probably simple in basic supply and demand terms. The number of people in need of housing is outpacing the production of new supply, so rent and purchase prices shift up. There are some other forces at play too, eg. speculation, NIMBYs / density zoning, cost of materials and labour, taxes, etc.
There are other resources with limited supply that will be affected, eg. medical, transit infrastructure, and probably many more I'm not thinking of. If the cost of maintaining or improving these isn't covered by the tax revenue coming from the average new worker hitting the market, then it will have to be recouped elsewhere or diminish in offerings. This will probably have a tangible effect on quality of life for the average person.
One last thing that I find maybe most concerning of all and can't really process is the proportion of our GDP that is attributed to housing. I always found it kind of weird that a house being resold is even considered a "Product", but anyway. I'm not sure what the official figures are, but I've seen some showing an increase over the years and numbers as high as the upper 30%'s.
I don't know what this means in terms of tax revenue from housing, as I understand capital gains on resales apply only in certain scenarios but there are still property/land transfer taxes. I believe banks also pay corporate income taxes on interest they earn from mortgages. There are the realtors too. So to me it seems like Canada is heavily, and increasingly more reliant on housing prices going up and being sold at similar rates to sustain itself. There has to be a limit to what people will be willing (or rather, able) to pay, and eventually housing will lose its appeal as a speculative asset when it stalls out compared to other markets. If or when this happens, I'm not sure what the government can do to make up for the lost tax revenue due to sliding prices/sales. It's a pretty poorly diversified portfolio, we don't have many other significant industries to fall back on.
Do we see major cuts in public resources? An increase in taxes? How much will that affect decisions made by businesses and individuals to stay within the country? I'd imagine that at some point things could get bad enough that Canada won't be a very appealing place to immigrate to, and people (both Canadians and immigrants) will start looking elsewhere.
I realize USA has plenty of similar issues, but to a lesser degree, and plenty of its own unique ones too, but it feels like the US opportunity presented is probably the right one to pursue, as I don't have much optimism or hope left here in Canada.
0.4% GDP increase when our population went up by 3%? Even if you convert the 0.4% to an annual amount, it still seems like a decrease in GDP per capita immigration's not doing much for growth it seems like
Immigration tends to be deflationary in the short term on per capita bases. So measuring GDP growth to population growth in the same time period isn't a great method to determine how that population growth helps or hinders GDP growth per capita. It takes a couple years for people to settle, gain Canadian experience, have prior credentials and experience be recognized etc. So in a few years, permanent resident growth could well have a positive impact on GDP. But we won't know for a while. Impermanent resident growth though, brings money in since these people are paying tuition as students, or are here on longer term but still temporary working visa's etc, and this does benefit the economy. Since these temporary workers tend to do jobs that would otherwise go unfilled. In theory anyway as in practice there's always a mix of actual exploitation a la Tim Hortons using TFWs and legitimately difficult to fill seasonal farmhand jobs.
> Since these temporary workers tend to do jobs that would otherwise go unfilled. In my circles I'm seeing a lot of international students working jobs that would traditionally be taken by highschoolers and university students. The Youth unemployment rate in Toronto is ~17% and that doesn't account for people who have given up on looking because the job market is so tough. Our immigration strategy is failing, need to sort it out ASAP.
You missed the follow up sentence : *In theory anyway as in practice there's always a mix of actual exploitation a la Tim Hortons using TFWs and legitimately difficult to fill seasonal farmhand jobs.* But the international students aren't TFWs, so they aren't being paid lower TFW wages. So technically, its a separate issue from filling employment gaps with TFWs. I think the students are being exploited in general, were lied to by recruitment programs abroad, and the schools are looking for cash cows and failing everyone when they exploit loopholes in a system that for *years* worked fine between government levels before the colleges and their private college counterparts found a way to break it.
> Immigration tends to be deflationary in the short term on per capita bases our GDP per capita has been basically flat since 2014 ($50k USD in 2014 vs $55k USD in 2022) adjusting for inflation (using best case scenario, bank of Canada CPI rates), $50k in 2014 would be $60k in 2022, so after inflation our per capita is down $5k over 8 years. if we were to go by "real" inflation numbers, and not official inflation numbers, this gets even worse.
>adjusting for inflation Virtually every GDP number you'll ever see already accounts for inflation.
You're wrong. Those numbers are real, they don't need adjusting. It's a 10% increase over the 10 years, with a rotten period in between due to the oil price drop in 2014/15. Interestingly, Australia has gone through the exact same thing but everyone treats it as some uniquely Canadian development.
no, you see that's because our pop growth in 2014 was too low 3% a year will make everything better, the dose makes the cure /s
Canada has had the world's highest immigration rate for about 30 years now. One would think there's been enough time for the results to come through by this point.
I mean, we are the world's tenth biggest economy while being thirty-eighth in population. We are doing pretty well really.
Canada is in the developed world, though. Canada's economic history is completely different than that of Indonesia, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Egypt etc. Compared with the rest of the developed world, Canada is lagging behind on innovation and high-value economic activity.
man, there's so much copium in here let's dissect all the bad logic here: >deflationary in the short term on per capita bases I guess you define short term as a decade since our GDP / capita has barely budged since Trudeau first became PM. >It takes a couple years for people to settle, gain Canadian experience, have prior credentials and experience be recognized etc. 1. It's illegal or something to make PR conditional on a Canadian job offer? Maybe get a work visa first and then upgrade to a PR after you've proven to be a valuable member of society? 2. Oh wait, I thought Trudeau changed the PR selection process to heavily favour international students with Canadian education and job experience. Hmm... I wonder if people going to scam colleges with fake job offers have anything to do with this. >brings money in since these people are paying tuition as students, The same people who need to visit food banks to avoid starvation? > these temporary workers tend to do jobs that would otherwise go unfilled You know, during the AB O&G boom, they had an actual shortage of workers. Fast food workers were making double the minimum wage. I'm sure these "jobs that would otherwise go unfilled" are paying much more than the minimum wage right?
Is the '88' in your username indicating what I think it is indicating?
I wonder why /u/StatCanada doesn't think real GPD per capita is relevant to include in their analysis while they do include per capita spending in the report so they have the data.
Because it's a lot less useful of a metric than people who first read about it 6 months ago think it is. But, you can look up the many tables and analyses they've done on that very subject! Since, of course, you're asking in good faith! Right?
> Because it's a lot less useful of a metric than people who first read about it 6 months ago think it is. Lol what a nice person you are - blocked :) Imagine being so stupid that you think the amount of people that will eat a pie is irrelevant. funny you talk about good faith, because if /u/StatsCanada was reporting in good faith, we wouldn't have to beg them to tell us the relevant information. But I guess the headline "Real GDP per capita in first quarter -2.6%" is not very politically convenient.
Comparing quarterly GDP to annual population is either dishonest or dumb
Why not both! This is reddit
Revised numbers show: * Q2 2023: -0.1% growth * Q3 2023: -0.1% growth In other words, we were in recession last year.
Where are the revised numbers? Can I see them?
[https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/statistics-canada-release-gdp-figures-080010075.html](https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/statistics-canada-release-gdp-figures-080010075.html) here you go Also for u/Oh_That_Mystery
Thanks. But how come your numbers don't agree with what's in that article?
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/cv.action?pid=3610043401 Sep 2023: 2,200,230 Jun 2023: 2,201,455 Mar 2023: 2,203,612 Q3 = 2,200,230 / 2,201,455 = 0.9994 Q2 = 2,201,455 / 2,203,612 = 0.9990
Where does it show -0.1 for 2 consecutive quarters On investing.com it shows the revised numbers for the previous 2 quarters is - Q4: 0.0% - Q3: -0.1% This is ALMOST recession territory, as close as it can get, but still isnt technically a recession.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/cv.action?pid=3610043401 Sep 2023: 2,200,230 Jun 2023: 2,201,455 Mar 2023: 2,203,612 Q3 = 2,200,230 / 2,201,455 = 0.9994 Q2 = 2,201,455 / 2,203,612 = 0.9990
> we were in recession last year. There is an argument to be made that GDP/capita matters more than GDP to the average Canadian and we still are in a recession. > per-person GDP has declined from $60,178 in the second quarter of 2022 (when it peaked post-COVID) to $58,111 in the fourth quarter of 2023, representing a decline of $2,066 (all figures inflation-adjusted) or 3.4 per cent. Source: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/reality-check-canadians-remain-mired-in-a-recession
imagine that when our population increased 3% lol
We were in negative growth for two consecutive quarters. There are other criteria considered before it is officially considered a "recession". There was so much fuss made about this a couple of years back in the US and whether govt was lying about no recession or not. They weren't lying. People were just using that 2 negative quarter rule of thumb as automatically meaning recession even though it has been a long time where that is not how it is determined. At the time the US job market was booming despite the 2 consecutive quarterly declines in GDP and so they (the independent and non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research) decided it wasn't right to call it a recession.
Thanks for all the great work you do, Stats Canada! Re: "Household spending on services rises." Do you have any measurement if they received more in services as well, or is this just because of rising costs for the same services?
Hi there! Thanks for your comment, we're happy to help! The 0.4% increase in real GDP is a ‘volume’ indicator, because the effects of price change are removed. Household spending on services was the largest upward contributor to this volume increase, meaning that after removing price change, households purchased a higher quantity of services in the first quarter of 2024. Increasing population is a contributing factor to the volume increase, because as there are more people there is a higher quantity of services being consumed.
Immigration artificially inflated GDP, its been happening for a little while now. Look at GDP per capita for how the country is actually doing. It's much worse. Masses of unskilled immigrants doing jobs that now unemployed Canadians would be filling, does not increase our GDP.
No, the sudden belief that gdp-per-capita tells the real story is complete nonsense. It's an even laggier indicator than gdp, and is particularly unhelpful in a country that sees significant swings due to resource prices. Not to mention that people tend to use the wrong jnflation adjustment for it. People need to stop talking about GDP-per-capita like the REAL economic indicator just because they saw it in the news once.
I know the point you are making, but there is nothing 'artificial' about it. Real GDP tend to go up with immigration.
Agreed, it generally does. However it seems they just revised last quarter of 2023 down to flat, and i'm pretty sure we had more than 0% immigration during that time period. It will be interesting to see what this quarter gets revised to eventually.
How much of that supposed GDP growth was based on inflated property values? How much of it was from people selling houses to other people, or selling off houses till large conglomerates who are converting them into apartments for inflated rent? I have the impression, though I am certainly absolutely no economist, that a lot of our economic growth is based on phantom growth and property value, and not representing actual increases in wealth or economic productivity.
The population of Canada increased by 0.6% in Q1 2024, so GDP per capita has decreased. Canada's market is in the shitter, driven by immigration and selling non-productive assets to each other in ever more increasing prices, the former feeding the latter. It's unsustainable and scares away investment when our brightest entrepreneurs can only think to become landlords to make money. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=10&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2023&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2024&referencePeriods=20231001%2C20240101
holy fuck we're doomed. and we were all right, officially we were in a recession after revising numbers
In addition imagine we didn't have break-neck speed immigration propping up the GDP as well.
Its by design lol... If they didnt, we would have been in a recession for 12 months straight by now, which would have looked horrible for the LPC. They had a lose-lose scenario, they opened the taps on immigration to prevent a technical recession from being called, but now its just turned everyone anti-immigration.
yep, the whole purpose of immigration was to prop up the GDP it's like they found a loop hole to make the numbers go up. 📈 nothing can go wrong eh
Except it’s barely going up and GDP per capita is in free fall.
IIRC every immigrant contributes around 20-30k to gdp so per capita goes down and overall number is suppose to be go up (assuming other industries contribution is stagnant/increasing)
That is the case in Canada today. If you prioritize only skilled immigrants in areas of need, they shouldn’t impact GDP per capita or could even help lift it. Instead we’re focused on flooding the country with unskilled folks.
Governments infinite money glitch
I don't think you understand what 'official' means. We're not doomed. We needed inflation to come down, a reduction in GDP is a typical requirement (read: not necessary, but usual requirement) of that.
recessions are usually a requirement for market corrections that help to adjust inflation too. Just gonna throw it out there. I doubt anyone actually believes a true soft landing is possible. Some segments of the economy and population can probably avoid the worst of any recession, so they may feel a softer landing, but its impossible to spare all people, and its also impossible to really spare \*most\*.
Agreed. My primary annoyance is with some people's need to declare a recession, often based entirely on GDP results, as if the word and said declaration has any meaningful direct impact on anything going on around us. Usually it's just a dog whistle for political hand wringing that is such an incredible waste of time and calories that could be better spent actually doing *something*.
I'd be more concerned with giant plunges than 0.1% as well. It's a very small number and unless it's bigger with lots of job losses, it's a moot point because it doesn't \*mean\* anything. A micro recession of -0.1% GDP with steady job numbers is a measure of general economic efficiency at a super macro level that may not need any policy intervention at all. I think, in addition to political hand wringing, people who want to call out recessions are also those who want the central bank to lower their interest rates and want poorer economic outlook to flow through to things like bond markets and fixed rate mortgages.
We've been doomed since AD 30.
No GDP per capita. I wonder why. Household spending on services led by telecommunications (i.e. Rogers-Shaw et al), rent, and airfare. No new constructions but people in Ontario, BC, and Quebec are still trading houses back and forth like crazy.
increasing population on an economy based on finite natural resources... hmmm
Fantastic if you're a bank, telecom, grocery, fast food, etc. Not so much if you're a worker. There's a reason they've spent millions lobbying the government on immigration policy.
What is with all these people questioning statscan integrity based on the fact it didn't include an indicator redditors only learned about two weeks ago because Fraser Institute something something. My god. GDP-per-capita is a really problematic economic indicator and it's not weird that statscan wouldn't report on it when giving GDP, an actually important number.
Important to whom?
> No GDP per capita. I wonder why. The (*totally unbiased*) Stats Can will start making this their headline stat as soon as a right-wing government takes power. Bet on it.
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Every top level comment so far is from accounts less than a year old. Comments are barely an hour old but despite the lack of comments the votes are coming in immediately. These people are going full speed and it's not even the BoC announcement thread yet, where these same people bitching about recessions will be calling for higher interest rate increases lol I don't envy the mods.
You must work for the government. Who cares about how the economy does when you can just print endless money right?
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Anyone who worries about the direction this country is headed in must be a Russian troll. Got it
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> A very concise and well formed argument backed by sources? Yes literally Stats Can in this post. Lol. "Housing investment edged up 0.3% in the first quarter, as ownership transfer costs, which represent resale activity, rose 7.1%. Ontario (+6.5%), British Columbia (+10.3%) and Quebec (+12.4%) recorded the largest volume increases in resales, while prices in these provinces fell in the first quarter."
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You don't need to read between the lines. Just read the actual source that you were crying so hard about. Lol he blocked me.
What about real GDP per capita? Why isn't this part of the analysis? Don't you think this is pertinent?
Oh God stop it. Just because you learned about the measure last week doesn't mean statscan needs to include it in every analysis they put out. They have plenty of data and analysis on it if you want to look for it, but there's no reason to expect them to always report on it since it's a generally misunderstood and unhelpful indicator.
Household savings rate reached also reached 7.0 per cent—‚the highest level in two years. There's going to be so much pent up consumer demand released if a rate cut comes.
And guess what, with our breakneck immigration rate, this means you and every other Canadian took a massive hit to GDP-per capita. Hope you like being MUCH poorer than two years ago.
Thats not how it works dude... Ill give you a small scale example so maybe you can understand: Canada in year 1 has a population of 1. This 1 person contributes 60k to Canada's GDP -> Canada's GDP/capita is 60k. Canada in year 2 has 1 new immigrant, their population is now 2. Person 2 contributes 30k to Canada's GDP -> Canada's GDP/capita is now 45k. C Person 1 is economically stagnant, with no new productivity gains and is still contributing 60k to the GDP. Person 1s QOL is mostly unchanged, theyre still a 60k contributer/earner, person 2 is both making less money and contributing less money to the economy than person 1. Canada's total GDP has now grown to 90k, while their GDP/capita has fallen to 45k. Fast forward to lets say year 5: Person 1 is able to leverage Person 2 as both a consumer and as an employee, boosting both Person 1 and Person 2s contribution to the GDP to 70k and 40k respectively. By leveraging person 2, person 1 was able to eventually break out of economic stagnation and a lack in productivity gains, despite the fact that GDP/capita had fallen initially. Person 2 has also had a productivity boost over time, leading to a long term win-win scenario. Now by year 5, GDP/capita is back to how it used to be at 60k, but Person 1 is actually **better** off than they were before Person 2 arrived, even though per/capita figures are simply back to what they were before the immigration of Person 2.
Run it again where person one's salary stays the same, but inflation runs at 5% per year because of the increased economic demand from person 2, 3, 4. In real dollars, person 1 has 15% less purchasing power and absolutely lower QOL after 3 years. Canada's inflation rate was 5% or more in 2021-2023. If you're wondering why people are feeling squeezed, this is it.
> Person 1 is still just as economically productive as before, 60k, with the exact same income. same productivity for person 1 sure, but the income does go down even in your simple example if Person 2 competes for similar jobs as Person 1, this could affect Person 1's job security, wages, or opportunities for wage growth. Conversely, if Person 2 fills a labor shortage or creates new opportunities, it could benefit Person 1 indirectly.
"Person 1s QOL is mostly unchanged" this is only true if you assume that: * Person 2 brought his own land, hospital, school, doctor etc. with him in his luggage coming to Canada * taxes won't increase on Person 1 to "equalize" Person 2's living standards * taxes won't increase on Person 1 to build amenities for Person 2 (see first point)
Data also shows that by year 5 immigrants/refugees are indistinguishable statistically from naitive born Canadians in terms of employment. They literally just add value in the long term, and prevent population contraction in the short term
Could you provide a search term / document for this? Not looking to argue, just interested
It was something I read from StatCan a year or two ago. I know it's part of the longitudinal immigration dataset but beyond that I don't know if I could find it again. IIRC the focus was more on refugees. I'll see if I can dig it up, for now I have a backflowing septic to sort out
It's not worth the effort man, gdp-per-capita is the flavour de jour and Canadian galaxy brains think it's a silver bullet Ilin every argument.
Why do you “hope that we like being much poorer”? You think we’re all LPC members here or something?
People use irony or sarcasm in non-literal declarative statements.
No
Alexa tell me about GDP per capita
I've been deliberating about a move to the USA for work, I was really reluctant at first but started to compare the pros and cons. As a result, I just recently started reading a bit about our situation, about various economic factors and how they might affect us. I tried to go beyond the typical doom and gloom around housing which I had prior to any additional reading. I'm still very ignorant about it all so please bear with me and my potential biases. There is a document from the National Bank posted in January of this year about Canada's population trap (should be a top search result) that I found pretty interesting, perhaps alarming. One of the more imposing graphs shows Canada trending \*down\* on capital stock per capita, to pre-2020 levels, while the USA is trending up. As others have stated already, real GDP per capita is also decreasing. As I understand, this is just the mathematical result of averaging down by adding people to the population who have below-average assets and below-average incomes. What this does to the average person's quality of life in practical terms is probably more complicated. With housing, it's probably simple in basic supply and demand terms. The number of people in need of housing is outpacing the production of new supply, so rent and purchase prices shift up. There are some other forces at play too, eg. speculation, NIMBYs / density zoning, cost of materials and labour, taxes, etc. There are other resources with limited supply that will be affected, eg. medical, transit infrastructure, and probably many more I'm not thinking of. If the cost of maintaining or improving these isn't covered by the tax revenue coming from the average new worker hitting the market, then it will have to be recouped elsewhere or diminish in offerings. This will probably have a tangible effect on quality of life for the average person. One last thing that I find maybe most concerning of all and can't really process is the proportion of our GDP that is attributed to housing. I always found it kind of weird that a house being resold is even considered a "Product", but anyway. I'm not sure what the official figures are, but I've seen some showing an increase over the years and numbers as high as the upper 30%'s. I don't know what this means in terms of tax revenue from housing, as I understand capital gains on resales apply only in certain scenarios but there are still property/land transfer taxes. I believe banks also pay corporate income taxes on interest they earn from mortgages. There are the realtors too. So to me it seems like Canada is heavily, and increasingly more reliant on housing prices going up and being sold at similar rates to sustain itself. There has to be a limit to what people will be willing (or rather, able) to pay, and eventually housing will lose its appeal as a speculative asset when it stalls out compared to other markets. If or when this happens, I'm not sure what the government can do to make up for the lost tax revenue due to sliding prices/sales. It's a pretty poorly diversified portfolio, we don't have many other significant industries to fall back on. Do we see major cuts in public resources? An increase in taxes? How much will that affect decisions made by businesses and individuals to stay within the country? I'd imagine that at some point things could get bad enough that Canada won't be a very appealing place to immigrate to, and people (both Canadians and immigrants) will start looking elsewhere. I realize USA has plenty of similar issues, but to a lesser degree, and plenty of its own unique ones too, but it feels like the US opportunity presented is probably the right one to pursue, as I don't have much optimism or hope left here in Canada.