FIRST READING: Canada’s not-great economy takes a turn for the worse

On Oct. 31, Statistics Canada projected that the economy was set to shrink by 0.1 per cent in the third quarter of 2023. Given that it already shrunk by 0.2 per cent last quarter, this means Canada is already well into six consecutive months of negative growth — the generally accepted definition of “recession.”

Canada is continuing to see meagre job growth. But any new jobs are immediately being overwhelmed by immigration numbers that remain at all-time highs.

An economic update released last month by Statistics Canada estimated that Canada added an average of 40,000 new jobs for each month of 2023. In each of those months, however, the working-age population surged by 78,000 — “almost twice the average increase in employment,” statisticians noted.

This means that in just the first eight months of 2023, Canada added 320,000 jobs, but also added 624,000 people looking for jobs. “With population growth outpacing employment gains, the employment rate … has edged lower,” wrote the statistics agency.

Immigration has been outpacing employment growth for several years now, but never anywhere close to the absurd disparities recorded in 2023.

In 2022, for instance, Canada added a monthly average of 34,000 new jobs against a monthly increase to the working population of just 41,000.

This trend has already manifested itself in some unbelievable scenes in parts of Ontario, with hundreds of workers seen queuing for a chance at a minimum wage retail job.

In Waterloo, Ont., last week, a Dollarama posted a listing for an “assistant team leader” and was swamped with nearly 2,000 applications, according to a screenshot on reddit. In early October, Toronto’s Dufferin Mall held a job fair for seasonal and entry-level retail jobs — and saw lineups of applicants stretch out the door and around the block.

On Tuesday, a new report by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship confirmed a trend that has been showing up in polls and surveys of new immigrants since at least the end of the pandemic: Spiking rates of immigrants are abandoning Canada to immigrate somewhere else.

The study’s most recent data on “onward migration” came from 2019, when the economy was on firmer ground and the immigration rate was less than half its current totals.

But even then, the rate of new Canadians leaving for greener pastures was “31 per cent higher than the historical average of 0.9 per cent.”

“After giving Canada a try, growing numbers of immigrants are saying ‘no thanks,’ and moving on,” read an introduction by Institute of Canadian Citizenship CEO Daniel Bernhard.

Forecasts for the Canadian economy were not particularly optimistic at the beginning of 2023. Even if Canadian GDP growth was still technically keeping its head above water, the country has been in a per-capita recession since mid-2022.

In the first months of 2023, the economy was still growing by fractions of a per cent each quarter. But with Canada now absorbing more than one million new people each year, each Canadian’s individual share of the economic pie has continued to shrink.

Western Canada had experienced a severe drought, which might have explained a slowdown in the agricultural sector. But analysts were less able to explain why manufacturing, retail and basically every other economic sector lost ground.

And the numbers got particularly dire when looking at GDP per capita, one of the indicators that most accurately portrays the individual Canadian’s experience of the economy.

The National Bank of Canada noted that in the third quarter of 2023, GDP per capita plunged 2.4 per cent as compared to the year prior. “The first time this has occurred outside of a recession,” they wrote.

In tandem with all of this, meanwhile, is that Canadians are seeing dropping employment and incomes at precisely the time when almost everything is getting dramatically more expensive.

This is most true of rents. Rents in Canada’s major cities are already among the world’s highest, with an average one-bedroom in Vancouver now going for an average of $2,976 per month. Even when accounting for cheaper markets, however, the average Canadian one-bedroom is still topping out at $1,889.

According to the most recent numbers from Rentals.ca, rents are now climbing by 11.1 per cent per year, meaning the average one-bedroom renter is now seeing their rent climb by at least $17 per month — and $21 for a two-bedroom renter.

And of all Canada’s gloomy economic indicators, real estate has some of the least hope of relief. Homebuilding – which hasn’t come close to meeting demand for at least a generation — is now declining, according to the most recent figures from Statistics Canada.

And with immigration growth well on track to hit the 1.1 million mark posted in 2022, each day is yielding an average of 3,000 new people into the Canadian real estate market.

Canada can’t maintain even our lacklustre status quo of military readiness, but we can fill our military installations with rising numbers of homeless people. After the Trudeau government hinted earlier this year that it would never, ever meet NATO’s two-per-cent-of-GDP baseline for defence spending, in September it then announced a further $1 billion cut to the Defence Department budget. But the City of Toronto has a plan for all that underfunded defence infrastructure: A recent motion called on the federal government to transform its five Greater Toronto Area armouries into homeless shelters and refugee processing facilities.

Roughly every few days sees another past or present parliamentarian calling for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation. Former Conservative cabinet minister Joe Oliver did it Wednesday in the National Post, which isn’t overly surprising. But a slightly more unusual example was longtime Liberal stalwart Percy Downe, who currently serves as a Liberal-appointed Senator for Prince Edward Island. In an opinion piece for National Newswatch, Downe (a former chief of staff to Jean Chrétien) said that only if Trudeau is out of the picture will “Liberals have a chance of being reelected.”

In a Parliament Hill scrum on Tuesday, Trudeau said that his government will “absolutely” not consider any more carve-outs to the carbon tax. So it’s only home heating oil: Gasoline, diesel, butane, aviation fuel, coke, coal, ethane, kerosene, methanol, naphtha, propane and refinery gas will still pay the tax, which is set for its next increase on April 1.