Canada in Recession - Reality & Propaganda

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:04]Come all you jolly fellows, come listen to my song. It's all about the lumber boys and how they get along. They're a crowd of jolly good fellows as ever you may find. It's how they spend their winter months in Harland down the pine.

[00:00:23]At 4:00 each morning, the boss begins to shout, "Heave out my jolly teamsters, it's time to start the route." The teamsters, they will all jump up in a most frightful way.

[00:00:34]"Where is me boots? Where is me pants?

[00:00:36]Me socks has gone astray."

[00:00:42]At 6:00, it's breakfast and every man is out.

[00:00:45]For every man who is not sick will surely be on the route. There's sawyers and there's choppers to lay the timber low. There's swampers and there's loggers to drag it to and fro.

[00:00:57]>> [music] [music] >> Hello Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland.

[00:01:19]We are here in the name of peace.

[00:01:22]But we are here also to declare our whole and forthright [music] support of what it envisages in military alliance.

[00:01:31]>> If he makes a decision that's wrong, it can't be repaired. [music] >> These days, Americans just don't understand us. We're at odds over everything from the war on terror to Iraq to softwood lumber to BSE. [music] >> But if the climate should change, if we should become anything like a police state in any shape or form, violence could become [music] justified.

[00:01:53]>> Everybody realizes Well, Mr. Trudeau it give a tinker's damn for Western Canada.

[00:02:00]>> Here we have the essence and genius of Canadianism, unity through division.

[00:02:06]>> And to feel like, as much as is possible in this kind of world, the master in his own house.

[00:02:18]>> Hello and welcome to another episode of the Red Ensign Special, economic nonsense and propaganda.

[00:02:27]Now, as I'm recording this episode, uh Canada has recorded its second consecutive quarter of negative GDP growth, and so Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada is out in full force uh through all of their various media channels to try to make the case that uh the Liberals have failed in their promise to deliver economic prosperity to Canada.

[00:02:55]Uh as Pierre Poilievre put it on his Twitter account, Mark Carney promised the strongest economy in the G7, he has delivered the only G7 economy in recession, he's just another Liberal in Canada, and Canadians are paying the price.

[00:03:09]This is part of uh what has been on this channel a well-documented effort from Pierre Poilievre to try to fight an election with the Liberals on the issue of affordability, the kitchen table in Canada, right? He tried to have that election against Justin Trudeau, he failed uh to get that election with Justin Trudeau, he would like to have that that election uh with Mark Carney here in a few years' time.

[00:03:38]Uh it remains to be seen whether or not he's going to get it, but this approach to um messaging is wrong on almost every level, and we're going to take this episode of the Red Ensign special to kind of break down the layers uh on the layers by which this is wrong both in terms of economic evaluation and in terms of connecting with Canadians.

[00:04:08]So, first things first, what actually happened? So, uh the propaganda event is that Canada is in a recession according to our esteemed friends in the world of in the world of economists, that means two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.

[00:04:29]GDP is a transactional measure. So, when uh goods are exchanged for cash in a country, uh that is a a contribution to GDP. When services are exchanged for cash in in the country, that's a contribution to GDP.

[00:04:47]Uh this is a particularly absurd metric. Uh if you think about that for a minute, it means that um if you convert savings into spending, that increases GDP. So, anytime you have people saving in a country, you're reducing the country's GDP.

[00:05:08]Uh anytime that you have debt spending in the country, that increases GDP.

[00:05:15]Uh both at the interpersonal at the like personal level, at the corporate level, and at the government level. So, a significant portion of Canada's GDP is just how much deficit spending uh the government of Canada is doing.

[00:05:29]And indeed, when we look at the last five quarters of uh GDP changes in Canada, we find that uh in Q4 2025, there was negative GDP growth 9.8 or 0.98% and in Q1 uh 2026, there's negative GDP growth of uh 0.14% right? So, what Poilievre is predicating his messaging on is that GDP growth was negative 0.14% uh in the quarter. And most of that change was delivered by a 1.7% reduction in government spending uh in Q1 2026.

[00:06:17]So, a policy which Poilievre nominally supports uh is leading the GDP decline uh in this in this period. But, we can see how ridiculous this game is if we look back in previous uh previous quarters. In Q4 2025, the primary change in uh GDP was driven by uh the depletion of inventories during the period of uncertainty surrounding uh the tariffs between Canada and the United States.

[00:06:49]Uh and so, you have this kind of ridiculous measure, and then you have ridiculous propaganda game games being played on top of it. And at a layer above that, we're talking about a 0.1% contraction in the size of the economy.

[00:07:04]Um that that's ridiculous uh to think about at every level.

[00:07:12]But, one of the most fundamental ways in which it is ridiculous to think about is that this is a metric which is not adjusted for population change size.

[00:07:21]And Canada has gone through in the last 10 years a lot of manipulation of the size of its population through things like the TFW program, for through the student program, etc. etc. etc. And so, if we do even like one level deeper of analysis, either looking at government spending as a component of GDP or simply to look per capita, we see that on a per capita basis in 2020 Q1 2026, GDP actually expanded because the population of Canada declined for the first time well, declined in Q in Q3, Q4, and Q1 in in Canada uh uniquely in its recent history.

[00:08:05]However, if we look at uh per capita GDP, so one level less ridiculous a metric, we quickly discover uh something a little bit concerning.

[00:08:19]Q1 2026 GDP in normalized dollars was 60,200 was 60,298.

[00:08:28]And if we go back to uh Q3 2022, it was 61,020.

[00:08:34]So, you're looking at an economy which has contracted when measured over a period of 4 years.

[00:08:43]Uh and Poilievre chooses to frame this as a technical recession uh driven by two consecutive looking at only the the most recent two consecutive quarters. And indeed, if we extend the window backwards, we find that Canada has seen no significant per capita GDP growth since about 2008.

[00:09:10]So, uh the Harper most of the Harper years uh after the oil boom, the entire uh administration of uh Justin Trudeau and the um government of Mark Carney have been characterized by no per capita increase in GDP and all growth in the metric that has occurred in the country has been driven by population increase. So, you can see if you dug even like a little bit under this under the surface, there's a vastly more powerful message available to conservatives to make their case. You could make the case that between 2008 and today, there's been like maybe 1% total growth in per capita GDP depending on whether you standardize to US dollars or Canadian dollars or or how you want to normalize.

[00:10:09]But essentially no economic growth on a per person basis for 17 18 years. Um That that's a powerful message indicating that fundamental change in uh the Canadian economy is necessary.

[00:10:27]And if you peel back the onion another layer and instead of looking at GDP, which is a metric uh again based on consumption, if instead we look at fundamental productivity, a kind of resource industrial analysis, we find that in Canada over the last uh decade or two, there have been uh 10 or 15 There's been a 10 or 15% increase in oil and gas extraction volumes. But if we look at any other metric, the country looks like it's in pretty rough shape. We see if we look at the balance of trade that uh we have a pretty successful Q1 2026, but that the country has run into trouble uh since the beginning of the trade war with the United States in 2025.

[00:11:20]If we look at fundamental productivity, uh we we see that Canada today has uh less inventory of beef cows than it did in 1980.

[00:11:33]We see that it produces uh something like 20 25% less volume of lumber products than it did in 2000.

[00:11:43]We see that it produces uh the least volume of steel uh that it has produced since 1990 and consistently produces at a level consistent with the 1970s.

[00:11:56]If we look at uh industrial minerals extraction, we can see that we're or at uh excluding 2008 uh relative modern lows for things like copper production.

[00:12:10]Um and significantly below recent highs.

[00:12:14]So, in terms of copper production, in 2014, we produced uh 715,000 tons and today we produce about 500,000 tons. That's a big decrease in the fundamental productivity of the country.

[00:12:28]And if we put our real economics hat on, we if we walk across category after category after category of fundamental uh industrial and resource extractive production in the country and see that as the population has expanded, the fundamental product productivity of the country has contracted, it begins to be obvious why Canadians are feeling poorer.

[00:12:56]There's a certain amount of uh games that can be played with the borrowing power of the country and with uh things like extracting wealth via migration and via student visa scams and so on. But at a fundamental level, that the basic productive economy of the country has shrunk enormously over the past 30 or 40 years.

[00:13:21]Uh which brings me back to the the messaging element. If you want to get people to actually be concerned with this fundamental shrinkage in Canadian economic productivity, you need to make it tangible.

[00:13:37]You need to look at I mean, it's not a terrible thing when the Conservative Party of Canada wraps this message in terms of consumer goods.

[00:13:47]Uh it would be trivial to compare uh how to compare the cost of housing or to compare the cost of groceries or to compare the cost of uh tran- transit or electricity or heating unit for in terms of units of purchasing power today versus units of purchasing power in 2010 and find that Canadians are rapidly getting poorer and rapidly coming under more financial stress.

[00:14:18]Every one of these uh is an effective propaganda campaign that can be waged.

[00:14:24]Just like when uh previous governments of Canada really wanted to mobilize the Canadian uh population in order to maximize their industrial output during the two wars. They had these tangible campaigns. This is an example of one of them designed to get Canadians to keep chickens in order to make up for the deficit of eggs uh being delivered in the UK during the Second World War. Uh these are extremely effective ways to communicate tangible issues to people.

[00:14:56]Your there's a real deficit of products and here's where the things that we're going to do to alter the economic situation are going to give you an opportunity to correct them.

[00:15:08]The problem is that Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada which he represents are broadly committed to the same sets of policies that have that have seen Canadians continuously getting poorer uh since the 1980s. Um and especially getting poorer since 2008. They're not interested in breaking out of that frame of mind. They're not interested in even going as far as looking per capita at productivity and imagining the economy of the country the country in terms of per citizen. They're interested in they're interested in the aggregate tax take of the federal government because that that's a measure of how much power the federal government has and they're interested in growing that power.

[00:16:00]Uh and so you have this ridiculous situation where we're playing a stupid propaganda campaign over an issue which is really really actually hurting uh middle and working-class Canadians very seriously. And it's an issue which is deeply structural. The actual economy of this country is in horrendous shape and it's in horrendous shape in significant part due to government policy, layers and layers and layers of government policy. So, you know, there's there's enormous room for political opposition on this this uh on this score and Pierre Poilievre and his Conservatives are absolutely intent on wasting that opportunity.

[00:16:48]Thank you for your time and attention. I hope you learned something.

[00:16:52]>> Canada originally was put together by two groups of people who didn't have much in common but didn't want to be American.

[00:16:59]>> The line just popped into my head. A bunch of the boys was a whooping it up and there I got my start.

[00:17:08]>> We have had a flag.

[00:17:10]Flags can be changed.

[00:17:13]But flags cannot be imposed as sacred symbols of a people's hopes and aspirations by the simple capricious personal choice of a prime minister of Canada.

[00:17:26]>> I have watched this country for half of my life from abroad, and we have turned complacency [music] into just that, a national sport.

[00:17:35]>> I I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, >> [music] >> but I am determined to understand what's happening. I I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me.