This time, you can’t blame the dollar or oil prices.
In the second quarter, Canada’s economic activity, as measured by inflation-adjusted GDP, fell 0.4% from the first quarter, or 1.6% annualized, “the largest decline in quarterly GDP since the second quarter of 2009,” as Statistics Canada put it in its data release.
It was a brutal reversal of the first quarter, when GDP had jumped an upwardly revised 2.5% annualized.
Canada’s economy is to a considerable extent dependent on its resource sector, particularly oil and gas. But since mid-February, prices of crude oil, a crucial export product, soared (with the US benchmark grade WTI up over 80%!).
Given the soaring oil prices in the quarter, it’s even more unnerving that exports, which add to GDP, plunged 4.5% (nearly 20% annualized!), the worst plunge since Q2 2009. While exports of services edged up 0.6%, exports of good plunged 5.5%.
The US, where most of Canada’s exports end up, catches much of the blame.
The only good part in the exports debacle was aircraft and transportation equipment and parts, which jumped 5.6%, after having gotten clobbered during the prior two quarters.
But exports of cars and light trucks plunged 6.6% on slowing demand in the US. Exports of consumer goods plunged 6.8%, the worst plunge since Q2 2003!
Exports of energy products plunged 7.5%, including a 9.6% plunge of crude oil and crude bitumen (the product from tar-sands production sites), and a 19.6% plunge in refined petroleum products, due to slowing demand in the US.
Exports of metal ores and non-metallic minerals plunged 17.5%, the largest plunge since Q1 2009. If the word “plunge” appears a lot, it’s because it was that kind of report.
At the same time, imports, which subtract form GDP, rose 0.3%.
And you can’t blame the loonie: during the quarter, it was trading in the range around C$1.30 to the USD, where it was a year ago.
Canadian households, among the most indebted in the world, were trying to hang on by the skin of their teeth: overall spending inched up a weak 0.5%. Spending on services rose 0.8%. But spending on goods rose only 0.2%, propped up by non-durable goods, such as food, which rose 0.7%. But spending on durable and semi-durable goods dropped 0.5%, led by a 1.2% decline in motor vehicle purchases.
Thank God, someone is spending more: government spending rose 1.0%, “partly as a result of government spending related to the wildfire in Fort McMurray,” StatCan pointed out. It was the sixth quarterly increase in a row
Business investment in fixed assets – buildings, machinery, equipment – fell 0.1%, the sixth quarter in a row of declines. As in the US, businesses are not investing. And that is starting to be a structural drag on the economy.
While inventories in absolute terms edged down a fraction, sales declined at a faster pace. So inventories turned over more slowly, and the economy-wide inventory-to-sales ratio rose. When businesses feel that their inventories are too high, given the level of sales, they curtail their orders to bring inventories back in line, which turns into a drag on the economy in future quarters.
I’m not sure what to make of this report. It was terrible. It occurred when oil prices soared 31%, which should have supported oil exports. It occurred as the Canadian dollar remained stable. It occurred as the new government has been implementing its stimulus spending. It occurred based on plunging exports to the US.
There’s a good reason why petroleum products exports to the US dropped: the US oil industry is drowning in huge inventories.
But auto exports to the US dropped too. This shouldn’t have been the case, given the glorious demand for cars and trucks in the US. Only, that party too seems to be over. Now we’re hearing warnings from Ford and GM that auto sales in August have dropped sharply. Ford has been talking about a “car recession” for a while. Any drop in demand in the US goes a long way to explaining why Canada’s economy caught the flu in the second quarter.
For now, optimism reigns that this was just a one-quarter blip, that the statistical quirks will soon be ironed out, that the third quarter will rectify the debacle, that demand in the US will suddenly jump, and that US petroleum products stocks will somehow just evaporate….
And hopes are suddenly back that the Bank of Canada will see the writing on the wall and ease further, thus giving asset bubbles some more room to inflate. This includes housing, bonds, and stocks. That’s really what matters. And so bad news might once again be twisted into good news.
Housing and housing construction, among the most powerful sectors in the Canadian economy, fired up by a good dose of foreign money, have propped up the economy for years, through the oil bust even. But now, more Canadians are souring on their Magnificent Housing Bubble. Read… Fear Spreads of a Housing Crash in Canada
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RE: …Canada’s economy is to a considerable extent dependent on its resource sector, particularly oil and gas…
——
Indeed. Much of the problem is that Canada exports these in the cheapest commodity form with no “value added.” Why export natural gas so someone else can make polyethylene? Why export crude petroleum when it can be processed into polyester base? Why export these commodities when these can be domestically processed into much higher value added products which can then be exported? The same is true of the agricultural sector. Why export commodity grain and oil seeds, when these can be domestically processed/refined, adding value and domestic employment?
One of the first steps would be to selectively impose an export tax on raw, unprocessed commodity exports, and use the funds generated to promote domestic “value added” processing, increasing the GDP and creating jobs. The goal is to go up the “value added” chain as far as practicable before the “commodity” is exported, domestically capturing the jobs and profits.
Crap…I just lost my comment somehow.
Anyway, George…you nailed it. Where I live things are actually booming, (BC west coast….rural). But, the right wing Govt. coalition (BC Liberals) allowed the forest companies to close mills in order to export raw logs, 12 years ago. They officially got rid of appurtenance, a series of laws that linked BC mills to particular forest licenses. The amount of jobs discarded to appease CEOs and shareholders focused on quick short-term profits are astounding.
Nevertheless, logging is booming as is construction. Many contractors are booked up for 2 or more years, with firm initial payments held in escrow.
What has disappeared for us are the insane wages coming home from Alberta. It was absolutely out of control. I would see dumb (dumb dumb dumb) 20 year olds driving $80,000 pickups. My son knew a guy who bought a viper. Anyway, since those jobs disappeared things have settled down here. Wages are still very good if you have a trade or valuable skills. My son started an electrical company just over a year ago. He now has a full-time apprentice. He bills out his time at $65/hour…sometimes $80 for industrial work. If he takes his apprentice along for a job it is $110/hour. Usually, the apprentice is working on his own projects, but under direction. He usually works 6 days per week, paperwork and estimates are done, evenings.
I would imagine the big big decline is obviously Alberta, but also Ontario where their electricity rates are killing off business opportunities. Plus, NFLD and the entire east coast has lost their Alberta and off-shore wages with the oil bust.
regards
All these questions, which seem reasonable and logical, have been posed by every Marxist government that has existed and has attempted to create a closed economy, closed of course except for value-added exports. The only one missing is ‘Why don’t we expropriate all foreign businesses and use the profits to fund social programs instead of sending profits overseas?” Venezuela provided the most recent example of these policies, along with a destroyed currency, and it only took about 15 years.
The answer to all of them of course is that you can’t force people in other markets to buy higher cost goods for no reason, and Canada has a high-cost, somewhat inefficient economy. Relatively little can be manufactured here unless it is subsidized, directly or indirectly. In fact, the manufacturing base has progressively declined over the last few decades.
Whereas we used to have branch-plant manufacture/assembly, due to manufacturing tax law changes favoring finished imports in the ’70s that segment of the economy had almost disappeared by the late ’80s. Concomitant with that decline, low-cost manufactured imports from the Orient have overwhelmed local high-cost producers (as they have in many other countries).
About our only significant manufacturing export is autos and auto parts and that only exists because of a trade agreement – originally created to allow sales of US cars in Canada. Part of the original agreement provided onerous import duties on vehicles from other countries; I don’t know whether that exists any more. Bombardier exports planes once in a while, but is bascially an unofficial ward of the government.
Totally agree. Canada is as close as it gets to a socialist economy running out of other people’s money to pay for the benefits.
Evth is highly subsidized and regulated in Canada, it is impossible for creative destruction to take place.
Add to this the insane real estate prices that have driven out of the cities most dynamic and smart people and you have a recipe for long term stagnation.
Canada keep importing phd’s from third world countries that in most cases end up working as taxi drivers or sales assistant at Best Buy while the best and bright Canadian educated move to the US at the first opportunity.
Drive through any city in Canada and you will see that the gas price is the same to the cent everywhere, and when it changes, all gas pumps update within the hour, unbelievable. So is with almost evth.
Excellent comment Robt. Is it surprising that the chorus begs for higher taxes on someone else to solve all the problems?
RE: …All these questions, which seem reasonable and logical, have been posed by every Marxist government that has existed and has attempted to create a closed economy, closed of course except for value-added exports…
—–
Seems like rather a strident observation. How is putting the long-term best self-interests of the majority, and thus the country, first Marxist?
In addition to the obvious loss of industrial activity, jobs and tax base, which raw/minimally processed exports cause, there is also the considerable problem of expanding pervasive tax evasion through revenue shifting/hidden commissions [kick-backs], enabled through international trade.
To be sure a policy of discouraging export of raw/unprocessed commodities, while encouraging as much domestic value added processing as practicable before export, will cost some [politically powerful] sectors considerable money and require substantial investment, at least in the short run. However in the medium to long run, society as a whole will be much better off, with increased employment, economic/industrial activity, and expanded tax base.
One example, among far too many, is the liquidation of the domestic dimension lumber and plywood sectors in both Canada and the U. S., with the raw logs exported for processing. No only were the processing jobs and tax base lost, the current accounts trade deficit was increased when the finished lumber, plywood, paneling, verniers, and finished products such as furniture had to be [re]imported. Now “rinse, lather, and repeat” for textiles, shoes, steel, consumer electronic, etc.
And BC Ferry construction, overseas!!
What your proposal means is that you’re trying to fix prices on commodities for export. If the world can buy goods for a dollar, why would they pay 1.20, or some other amount greater than a dollar? The pricing basis for the export price would be the world price plus export tax. For obvious reasons, this policy immediately fails.
As far as domestic manufacturing is concerned, the reason Canada imports plywood, or printed paper packaging(!?), or furniture, or anything else, is because it’s cheaper to do so. As I wrote above, Canada is a high-cost manufacturing environment. We are simply not competitive. If we were competitive we would be shipping finished goods. The reason for this is economy of scale in the domestic market and low productivity. If we wanted to impose export taxes on raw material, then we’d just be attempting to be a high-cost exporter of raw material, and buyers would simply shop elsewhere, as there is an abundance of logs or anything else, available at world prices, not some price we want them to pay because it’s good for us.
RE: …As far as domestic manufacturing is concerned, the reason Canada imports plywood, or printed paper packaging(!?), or furniture, or anything else, is because it’s cheaper to do so. …
—–
While the word “cheaper” rolls easily off the tongue, and actually meant something at one time, currently it only means a lower item price at the point of sale.
The additional costs paid in taxes at a different time due to this apparently cheaper price are never considered.
There is the cost due to the displaced workers, such as unemployment compensation, and training, training, training (that never seems to result in a good job). There is also the higher individual taxes that result when the tax base is reduced when manufacturing is “off shored,” as well as the very considerable social costs of increased spousal/child and drug/alcohol abuse by the idled workers, including social worker/police intervention, court, and prison costs.
There is also the very large non-numeric cost of the mental health problems of “learned helplessness” and “masked depression” which are generated in an increasing fraction of the population by idleness and unemployment, as demonstrated in the Indian reservations and ghetto urban areas.
We urgently need to conduct an in-depth critical analysis of the actual total costs/benefits of “free trade” on a societal or aggregate basis, and determine just who pays the costs and who reaps the benefits. FWIW – there are no representatives of the people at the meetings where the TPP and TTIP agreements were formulated, nor were there any at the G8/G20 meetings or at Davos [World Economic Forum].
That calls for a toast with a double shot of Canadians finest whiskey! Hear, hear!
An export tax on raw materials. We tried that when the original Trudeau was PM. It was an unmitigated disaster, and will never happen again. Thankfully.
Yup. Taxing everything . That’ll do the trick.
RE: Yup. Taxing everything . That’ll do the trick.
Straw man! How is taxing exported raw commodities “taxing every thing?” Don’t want to pay the raw commodity export tax? Then processes it domestically, and then export that. For example, with a selective raw commodity export tax on natural gas, if the NG was processed internally first to ethylene, and then to polyethylene, there would be no export tax on the polyethylene. Same thing for crude oil. Tax crude oil exports, but not the exports of processed oil such as polyester base, plastics, elastomers, ag chemicals, etc. Same thing for selected agricultural products. For example, impose a significant export tax on commodity oil seeds, but no export tax on Canola, Soybean, etc. This could be “tweaked,” with a small tax on bulk vegetable oil exports, and no tax on consumer packaged exports (which would also help the plastic bottle manufacturers).
Your comment is clearly rooted in passion, unfortunately with little logic behind it. Read up a bit – maybe look at some trade papers and research the costs of buying imported “finished” materials.
Clearly – Canadian manufacturers cannot compete with other countries producing the same finished goods due to the high costs from taxation, regulation, banking fees and employee expectation (wages and benefits).
Taxing the export of raw materials will result in fewer exports of raw materials. It will not result in even a proportionate increase in the sales of finished goods.
The only way for Canada to compete is to reduce taxation & regulation, reduce employee benefits and increase productivity.
George,
We now pay more for tax than all food, clothing, housing combined.
I recall the former Lieberal Premier, Dalton McGuinty, of Ontario saying in 2010 (see the T.O. Star, https://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/2010/05/04/hst_will_hit_household_budgets_dalton_mcguinty_admits.html), “…blending of the 8-per-cent provincial sales tax with the 5-per-cent federal GST will boost the economy, eventually creating up to 600,000 jobs and generating $47 billion in investment.”
How’s that working out six years later? Were there not 600,000 jobs created?
The problem with trying to compare past with current tax rates, or tax rates between countries, that the rate by itself tells you very little. The critical factor is how much you get for the taxes.
While Canada’s tax rate is high, so are the governmental services. For example, how much as Canadians do you have to pay for health care, child care, university, etc.?
In order to perform a meaningful comparison, the *TOTAL* costs must be considered for a comparable level/amount of services. When the life-cycle costs such as medical care, pharmaceuticals, child care, university, etc., which are generally paid by the individual and/or their employer in the U. S., are combined with the “low” [and in general, highly regressive and inequitably applied] “taxes,” a substantially different conclusion is reached. This cost:benefit disparity is even more striking when “quality of life” factors such as poverty, illiteracy, maternal death rates, childhood immunization rates, etc. are considered.
A significant factor is the enormous amounts of time, attention and money the U. S. wastes on eternal counter-productive, non-essential colonial warfare, and the unjustified and grossly excessive positions of socioeconomic/political influence the manufacturers of the weapons and materiel thus required, have achieved.
McDuffee I concur with you 100%. Exporting raw commodities (think rubber to 18th century England) is a most grievous mistake for the exporter. Always better to foster redundant, independent supply chains for products in different countries. Tariffs and targeted industry support by national governments creates jobs, growth, innovation and stability all around.
According to Wikipedia, Canada’s percentage of GDP from agriculture is only 1.7%. Is this accurate, and how can Canada increase the small percentage?
Couldn’t have anything to do with the previous CON government that was in power for the last decade decimating our manufacturing sector could it?…
Who says government is inefficient, that’s simply untrue! Most recent example is reduction of privately run prisons.
Like yours, our government doesn’t want manufacturing either, thus has been subsidizing offshore for decades and it shows, a hugely successful government program.
The decimation began in the ’70s, with the Liberal government, and the imposition of manufacturing sales tax on the landed cost of finished goods from overseas. Canadian manufacturers and branch plants operations had to pay on their local finished selling price. In a tight-margin competitive market, this had the effect of transferring production to the Orient. Local branch plant manufacturing had collapsed by the late ’80s.
Manufacturing jobs in North America have been on a 40 year decline. The biggest, most devastating declines in manufacturing jobs took place in the early 1980s and again in the early-to-mid1990s. There was nothing remarkable about the past decade regarding manufacturing employment – just more of the same slow, steady decline in manufacturing jobs (if not in output), with perhaps another brief acceleration during the financial crisis. We were told for a decade that our “petrodollar” was killing manufacturing. As we can see in the export numbers cited above, that was also untrue.
We’ll need to find new scapegoats. The old ones just aren’t cutting it anymore. Might I suggest an insanely bubbly housing market, that has created the biggest consumer debt load – and possibly the biggest misallocation of resources – in our 149 year history? I wouldn’t be the first. Unfortunately, if that is the case, things will get worse – much worse – before they start to get better. There is no soft landing from a 15 year debt binge.
Alistair, I have often wondered – and perhaps you can explain this – why houses in general cost so much more in Canada than in the US. I´m referring to towns and cities outside of Vancouver and Toronto. Is it simply economy of scale? Is it unionization?
Nicko,
No, the province of Ontario did it to itself, very thoroughly. Manufacturing is gone for good. Only gov’t subsidized manufacturers are still hanging around.
Canada can recover its lost economy and CAD$ by just firing its BoC governor POLOZ…Who is root cause for most of problems. If he keeps on providing cushion to housing and oil, govt. will never learn its lesson and canada will always have parallelized economy.
Bottom line is you can not run country on oil and immigrant, you have to design policies to have organic growth. Also, raising taxes is not the only solutions , as it keeps people tight for spending.
Reduce the welfare schemes is also interesting step.
otherwise….simply god bless Canada and CAD$ which can easily slip to 60cent to USD , when housing blows up…And OIL will not be saviour this time…
Poloz is just managing the mess that was left him – hard to do much more than ride out the Central Bank hyperinflationary insanity that’s developed in the last several years. Carney flew the coop a while back to go to England, after creating the biggest housing and debt bubble yet and scolding the public for it.
Way back when, John Crow was an outstanding governor, but got treated like garbage by the incoming government.
I miss John Crow every single day. And yes, I recall how he was treated as a pariah, not only by the incoming Liberals in 1993, but by critics from all ends of the spectrum during his tenure – including from those who should have known better. All because he refused to indulge in the fantasy of easy credit as the solution to our structural economic problems.
His predecessor Gerald Buoy, and Mr. Buoy’s American counterpart, Paul Volcker, were made of similarly strong stuff. All three men understood implicitly that sometimes a fair bit of misery needed to be endured first before real economic growth could ensue. They knew that central banks could be good at one thing and one thing only – restoring monetary stability. They believed, rightly, that growth could only come from the real economy; it could not be financially engineered.
The above final statement is factually correct but that does not stop the political establishment from trying to manipulate the system to project the illusion of “doing something” on behalf of the ordinary citizen. The get at the root of the problem we need to go back even further to the time of Graham Towers who was Bank of Canada Governor in 1939 and was summoned before a Parliamentary Financial Committee to testify under oath regarding Canada’s Bank Act and stated “every Bank loan is a new creation of money, and when it is paid back it ceases to exist” a far cry from current banker propaganda that banks make their money on the spread between the paltry interest they pay on deposits and the relatively high rates they charge on loans, a convenient distortion of the truth as a smokescreen to keep the masses from learning how banks actually operate with incredible leverage. The popular banker promoted misconception is that banks keep 10% of deposits as “RESERVES” and loan out the other 90% for a supposed limited spread as their fee in acting as a go-between for those with surplus capital wanting a return for risking their capital and borrowers needing capital to build businesses and create jobs and consumer loans to those unwilling to wait for things they want until they have SAVED the money. CREDIT, (really debt) has now replaced savings as borrowing has been made more attractive than saving because of artificially low interest rates that make it next to impossible to get a decent RETURN on investments in spite of increased risk.
Contrary to banker propaganda, (abetted by politicians who have sold out to the International Bankers, in realty the Bank Act allows these actual liabilities to be counted as “100% RESERVES against which the banks, as Graham Towers truthfully testified are allowed to create $10, in NEW MONEY and charge interest on this “creation from nothing, (debt based counterfeit money) with no intrinsic value ( in other words fiat) while at the same time the bullion banks unlawfully manipulate DOWN the prices of gold and silver, the only REAL & HONEST constitutional money.
A free market in precious metals based on supply and demand would soon expose the fractional reserve banking system for the colossal Ponzi scheme FRAUD that it is, which is WHY Henry Ford who understood this SCAM once stated that; “if the masses really understood how the banking system actually functions there would be a revolution by morning” or words to that effect.
This nefarious deception was started by s conclave of International banking families who held a secret meeting on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia to hatch the plot that would keep the world in perpetual debt to them through the monopoly of (debt money creation) allowed by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the precedent that now has all countries following the same pattern of private Central Banking not controlled by government. The whole nefarious scheme is exposed by a still in print book titled; “The Creature From Jekyll Island” by G. Edward Griffin and is still available from his website a Google search will reveal. Another good educational source on the subject is the You Tube series by Mike Maloney titled “The Hidden Secrets of Money” which in turn will expose you to other sources the main stream media will never publicize in our controlled media.
Canada’s Bank Act is fortunately slightly different in that provision was made for our Central Bank to create DEBT FREE money on government request and is now being SUED for not fulfilling that mandate. In simple terms, the assets of the countries natural resources belong to the natural citizens by birthright as a gift from our Creator and there is no logical reason why a government that has the best interests of its citizens first and foremost in its priorities could not directly issue the currency necessary for the development of its natural resources debt free?
WHY should we be held hostage by a monopoly to simply print numbers on coloured paper when they contribute NO labour or readily available raw materials for the things needed by a modern society? Anything that is physically possible and desirable can and should be made financially possible to facilitate any and all infrastructure and the government created currency simply taxed back over the life of what is created by human labour and available raw materials whether mined or grown. Such a “social credit system” by cutting out the middle- men, (private bankers) has the potential to reduce our taxes by up to 50% which would go along way towards reducing everyone’s living costs substantially.
The blueprint already exists in the Bank of Canada Act all we need is the political will to enforce and enable existing law. so the only conclusion possible is that our politicians regardless of party affiliation have SOLD OUT to the International Bankers monopoly and won’t bite the hands that feed them
Voters who are under the delusion that their vote makes a difference need to wake up to the fact that bankers support candidates for all parties that have the remotest chance at forming a government to be sure they retain their control of government behind the scenes.
All the suggestions made in earlier post, regardless of their individual merits will NOT solve the problem of our debt money creation system that underlies all of our economic troubles.
Only when enough ordinary citizens start bombarding their MP’s and MPP’s with questions and educate friends, neighbours and relatives with the information on our corrupt banking system and become activists on talk shows and letters to the editor will this “conspiracy of silence” be broken and open the door to possible reform. I have written to every Prime Minister and party leader over decades and been stone walled to date, but I will not give up trying to educate people to the real underlying problem.
I wonder how long until this catches up with Trudeau’s socialist handouts…..
To quote a supposed “wise man” I knew : “The Taxpayer has LOTS of money”.
Tell me what’s wrong with this picture: Canada has a $ 45 Billion trade Deficit with China and Baby Trudeau is prepared to waste MORE tax dollars PAYING to join China’s equivalent of the ECB they have in the EU.
Oh…..and 7 more Consulates in China.
Mr. Wolf:
You have these fantastic ads running from a company called SHE-IN. Being that I once worked for/as a fashion designer, I am distracted way to much. Excellent models and photos and out-fits.
Hard to pay attention to the blog when my normal, natural, male attention span (about 2 seconds) keep glancing over at the photos. Nice.
These ads are served by Google Adsense. Everyone sees something different. I have no idea what Adsense serves on your browser. Google determines the ads it serves based on the type of article you’re reading, the browsing history stored in your browser (cookies, etc.), and the data it has gathered about you over the years.
Just to have fun, clear your browser’s cache (if it’s on a computer rather than a mobile device), take your device to a cafe, and log in (different ISP address) and see what happens.
If you’re reading WS on your mobile device, you’re known to Google and all others by your device’s ID and there’s no escape.
:-]
@Event Horizon : Try using AdBlock and No Script in your browser….does wonders for cutting out the garbage ads. :]
“…. cutting out the garbage ads. :]”
I understand, but you should know that your recommendation destroys my revenues. WS is free to all readers because it’s advertisement supported.
Sorry about that Wolf….I usually disable those when reading WS and about 5% of the rest of the sites I frequent that I like.
I re-enable them for the majority of sites…….ad popups are almost as bad as spam emails these days. i am looking at your ad for Testosterone Pit as I type this. :)
Keep up the good work…….truth in print is rare these days.
Thanks!!!!
Hey, I’m not complaining. There is no way I will block these ads….and they ain’t garbage. They are very well done. My wife and daughter are always looking over my shoulder when I read Wolf’s blog………
Not that Canada’s economy isn’t garbage for the reasons you mention, but GDP is largely a meaningless stat the way it’s “calculated” (read: manipulated) these days. What happened here is that the Alberta wildfires caused a huge stoppage of oil exports to the USA in that quarter, and those go directly into the GDP calculation. Pretty hard to massage out a few billion in lost oil exports, hence the big decline. Take that out and you’d get either a modest decline or modest increase, but really, who cares? It’s a meaningless number.
Did you see the plunge in exports of autos and auto parts, and consumer goods?
Canadian production of crude oil is only 3% of GDP. (see Economist article http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21641288-growth-shifting-oil-producing-west-back-traditional-economic-heartland )
That’s not much, so if oil prices go up it’s not really going to juice the economy. If you think Canada is only an oil economy, you are trading on faulty information.
I’m pulling in over 200 grand this year, working as a licensed tradesman in Canadian, residential new home construction (if that’s not “frothy” then I just don’t know what is ;)) Many construction workers, are well into 6-figures, courtesy of this current….boom?
Mattamy says they’ll build spec homes for the next twenty years if they have to; and they have the land and the money to do it, too! That being said, it’s hard to imagine this “roll” ever coming to an end.
Hell, I think new home construction, has become a sort of “blue-collar” TBTF! I’ll be curious to see how the ‘shiny pony’ is going to get us out of this one (residing in Morontario, to boot!)
Articles like these is why I read this site, thank you! It’s good to be informed.
THANK YOU BC LIBERALS FOR RUINING THE ECONOMY YOU BIG GOVERMENT KEPPERS TIME FOR CHRISTI TO RESIGN BC ECONOMY IS DEAD SELL YOUR HOME NOW THEY ARE DROPPING AMAZINGLY FAST . THE BC LIBERALS HAVE NO IDEA OF WHAT IS GOING ON. INVESTING IN GAS WHEN LNG IS DEAD KILLING OUR REAL ESTATE HIRING EXCESSIVE GOVERNMENT
Could you try to locate the CapsLock key on your keyboard. Should be on the left side. That would be really helpful. Thanks.