OTTAWA — Canada’s version of the Great Global Recession may have seemed brutish, but — if economists are right about new output numbers being released Monday — it will also have turned out to be mercifully short and relatively mild.
With gross domestic product data released for June and the second quarter, the consensus of economists is that the economy continued to contract sharply for the third straight three-month period.
But it will also show that the recession, at least as it is technically defined in terms of gross domestic product, likely ended in June.
Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney took some heat last month for declaring the recession all but over — with only a smattering of hard data to back him — but most economists now believe the evidence is lining up squarely behind him.
The consensus is that the official report today will show that growth returned to the economy for the first time in 10 months in June — albeit minuscule growth of 0.2 per cent.
If true, and barring an unexpected reversal, Canada will have gotten off relatively easy, economists say.
“We have lost a lot of jobs, but in general, Canada has come out fairly well, fairly unscathed,” said economist Pedro Antunes of the Conference Board.
“Last fall it looked very dreary. But we should remember that even as we are entering the darkest hours, we do typically come out of these things.”
This time, however, it was not without a great deal of help and money.
TD Bank chief economist Don Drummond has few doubts the global recession would have lasted much longer and been far deeper had not central bankers acted quickly to slash interest rates and support lending, and governments responded in a co-ordinated fashion with trillions of stimulus dollars.
According to the White House, the U.S. alone will add have added as much as US$9 trillion dollars to its debt over the next decade, in large part because of the unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus.
In Canada, the federal government estimates federal and provincial stimulus spending will total $80 billion this year and next.
In the 1930s, rampant excess coupled with clueless governmental and central bank policies turned a stock market correction into one of the darkest economic periods in history.
For most of the industrial world, the downturn of 2008-2009 will indeed go down as the worst since the Great Depression. In comparison, Canada’s recession was milder and shorter.
In terms of total peak-to-trough GDP output, the current slump will come in at about half the 4.9 per cent pull-back of the early 1980s recession, similar to the 1990-91 contraction.
Job losses, while significant at 414,000 and likely still climbing, are also more in line with the early 1990s slump than with the longer and more painful slump of a decade earlier. By comparison, the U.S. has lost close to seven million workers.