FIRST READING: Everything (except Mark Carney's approval rating) is getting worse

National Post

2 days ago

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Canada has a Superintendent of Bankruptcies that keeps regular stats on just how many Canadians are going under each month. And according to data compiled by the site Better Dwelling, consumer insolvencies hit 11,464 in June. That's higher than any point since 2010, when the last cohort of victims from the 2008 Great Recession were finally throwing in the towel.
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More concerning is that the most severe type of insolvency — bankruptcy — is growing at an outsized rate. This is where we should mention that Canadian household debt is one of the highest in the developed world, with total consumer debt in Canada hitting a historic high of $2.5 trillion in February, according to a report by the financial analyst firm TransUnion.
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The share of workers collecting a government paycheque is at generational highs
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It's been widely reported that youth unemployment is hitting highs not seen in a generation. But Canada's overall employment rate is also getting steadily worse. The share of Canadians 15 years or older who have a job is now down to just 60.9 per cent. When omitting the temporary job losses caused by COVID lockdowns, that's the lowest sustained employment rate Canada has seen since the 1990s.
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With job losses occurring way faster in the private sector than in the public sector, the share of government jobs in the Canadian economy has now hit a high of 21.7 per cent. In other words, there is now a civil servant for every four Canadians employed in the private sector.
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There are now more bureaucrats in the job market than at any point since the early 1990s, just before a sovereign debt crisis compelled a rapid reduction in the size of the Canadian government.
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There's nothing inherently wrong with a trade deficit. The term merely refers to whether a country imports more than it exports, and need not have any connection with GDP or national wealth. The United States, notably, has spent decades with both a trade deficit and the world's largest economy.
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However, given the share of the Canadian economy devoted to export industries, it's of some concern that the Canadian trade deficit is hitting lows never seen before. According to recent Statistics Canada figures, April and June both posted the largest Canadian trade deficits on record, at $7.6 billion and $5.9 billion, respectively.
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The Carney government has already backed off on some of the more sweeping housing pledges it made during the 2025 election. While the Liberal campaign had promised to restore affordability with the 'most ambitious housing plan since the Second World War,' this was quickly checked by official assurances that housing prices wouldn't actually be going down.
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And for the foreseeable future, Canadian real estate is set to remain some of the most unaffordable on earth.
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Housing construction is poised to fall dramatically in the coming years, exacerbating the housing shortage at the core of the Canadian affordability crisis. In Ontario, for instance, housing starts have already charted a 25 per cent drop as compared to last year.
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