What's a technical recession — and is Canada in one?

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]The R word there, uh even with technical in front of it, could be all the qualifiers, you know, whether it's business or politics, this is still going to grab a lot of attention.

[00:00:10]>> These numbers aren't positive, that's for sure. Two consecutive quarters is what we call a technical recession when the economy shrinks, when it there's a contraction in economic growth for 6 months consecutively, really. And but when we say it's a technical recession, it's because there's there's also different ways to measure this. Do we compare it year over year? Do we compare it quarter over quarter? Do we compare it month to month? And needless to say, while we aren't seeing a lot of green arrows in these numbers, by some definitions, this is a technical recession. By some definitions, it's not, but there is not a lot of growth happening here. We are seeing some shrinking in the GDP, the gross domestic product. That's one of the ways that we measure how big the economy is, to put it simply. There. And it declined at an annualized rate, year over year, by small, according to Stats Canada, but it is present, and it's not anything that economists wanted to see or expected to see, David.

[00:01:12]>> Well, and that I think is the key thing, that yes, the economy has buffed been buffeted by tariffs and war and and and and there's been so much. Uh and yet, as you note, this was not predicted. They thought there would be just narrow growth.

[00:01:25]>> Yeah, well, we woke up this morning, we were thinking there might be some small growth, and then we get these numbers, and it's smaller, smaller, smaller, red.

[00:01:34]So, it's it had a few of us in a bit of a flap this morning, crunching some numbers and pulling up spreadsheets. You know, the last time Canada was into technical recession was during the start of the pandemic back in 2020. We are seeing economists already react to these numbers, though, by pointing out that while the economy is sluggish, you know, there's kind of a blah vibe to everything because of tariffs and energy prices dragging things down. This technical recession, if it happened, may be over by some measures or may just not be as big a deal as it sounds because oil and gas prices have gone up so much and that does inject money into the Canadian economy, David.

[00:02:09]>> Anisa Darry, thank you.