Stephane Dion: Canada’s economy is off the rails
Failed prime ministerial candidate Stephane Dion was raving in the House of Commons again today.
“Why has the Prime Minister refused to act to put our economy back on the rails?”
He sounded the same theme in this evening’s out-of-focus address to CBC viewers. (CTV’s Lloyd Robertson sheepishly and apologetically signed off without showing it because CTV never received the tape.)
Mr Dion’s incisive analysis has a small problem: The economy is not off the rails. What do you expect from a guy who bases his economic proposals on non-existent statistics?
Ottawa Citizen columnist Dan Gardner cites some boring economic statistics.
On Monday, StatsCan announced that “real gross domestic product increased 0.3 per cent in the third quarter, after remaining essentially flat over the first half of the year.” Admittedly, that is not the most thrilling sentence ever written. But it is important.
It means the Canadian economy is not in recession.
I apologize if the reader is now suffering severe cognitive dissonance. After all, the news is saturated in economic gloom. Pundits and politicians like to say we are embroiled in “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”
But the Canadian economy is not in recession.
The latest estimates for retail sales, building permits, and manufacturing orders are up. Our slow but respectable economic growth forms a stark contrast with the US economy, which, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, has been in recession for about a year.
That’s not to say our economy is glowing: Housing starts are down slightly, while the Toronto Stock Exchange has seen heavy losses since the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition announced its plans for a coup.
This Friday morning at 8:30 am (Ottawa time), Statistics Canada will release labour force estimates for November. It will be very interesting to see whether Canada’s economy fell right off the rails last month. If not, the coalition could be forced off the rails thrown for a loop.
The photo at the top shows Mr Dion indicating how far off the rails Canada’s economy has fallen.
As Agent 86 (a-la Maxwell Smart) would say, “missed it by that much”…