In Part 1 I took a quick look through some interesting charts on housing in Canada. I encourage you to read that if you missed it last week.
This week, let’s crimp from Maclean’s wonderful 6th annual summary of the best economic charts for 2020. The whole thing is well worth your time but these were some of the parts that stood out to me. All these charts can be found in the article.
The first chart from Macquarie is the total hours worked by industry. It’s an interesting take on where employment has grown since 2013 in a time of great employment growth in Canada. The rise in public workers and finance, insurance, real estate and construction are far outpacing gains in other private industries. I am not sure that is a recipe for a diversified economy, and a lot of that flat growth from 2013 to 2016 is obviously related to the Oil & Gas industry centered around Alberta.
Speaking of Alberta, our national economy is still wildly dependent upon energy as seen in this chart from Hilliard Macbeth. I am not sure it’s our best economic idea to restrict a major part of our economy without a backup plan already in place. We certainly don’t have that right now.
Even with all the issues with Oil and Gas, the Canadian economy is growing. In absolute terms, that is correct. But this chart from the IMF by way of Martin Pelletier is downright scary. It’s GDP per person (capita) over the past 10 years. Our individual share of GDP is actually DOWN over that time. In comparison, US GDP per capita is up over 20% in the same decade.
Canadian GDP is mostly positive because we have grown our population a lot in the last decade. Most of that is through immigration (More on that in Part 3 next week). It definitely isn’t coming from investment from corporations as seen in this chart by David Wolf. No business investment is leading to lower worker productivity which explains a lot of why our GDP per capita is down and our economy is growing at a snail’s pace. It’s like we are stuck in perma-frost.
I don’t have an answer for how this all plays out here in Canada. There are lots of other countries with way worse economic fundamentals than us. I just think we need to be having the right discussion about our current economy and the future economy we want to have. Having just finished a federal election recently, I didn’t see anything from any of the parties that paid more than lip-service to our economy’s structure. So perhaps it’s time we have that talk amongst ourselves instead?