Walter's first post in this thread:
Good times are back (and they’re going to get a lot better)
The last time Canada celebrated a landmark birthday – the centennial in 1967 – it was riding one of the great economic booms of its history.
The economy grew at an average real rate of more than 5 per cent annually in the 1950s and 1960s, as the baby boom and leaps in consumer technology kept the foot on the economic accelerator. That growth wave was cresting as the centennial approached, averaging 6.5 per cent in the three years leading up to the big birthday.
Indeed, the government’s chief concern in the mid-1960s was that the economy was growing too fast. It was worried about how to keep the party going, without it getting out of hand.
“We can all take satisfaction from the fact that our problems are no longer the problems of overcoming slackness or stagnation, but those of managing growth and prosperity. Our task is to sustain the longest economic expansion in Canadian history,” then-finance minister Mitchell Sharp said in his 1966 budget speech.
But by the time Dominion Day, 1967, arrived, the best of that growth was already behind us. The glory days of postwar expansion soon gave way to the tumultuous 1970s, and generally tamer and choppier growth in the ensuing three decades.
Today, as the country turns 150, things look quite different. Slow growth and even stagnation have been recurring themes for the economy ever since the 2008-09 Great Recession, a period of unsteady recovery that, for Canada, was extended by the major setback of the 2014-15 oil shock. With Canada’s population growth fading, the huge boomer generation beginning to retire and the country’s postwar manufacturing boom an increasingly distant memory, it’s unlikely that Canada will ever return to the kind of growth it enjoyed in its younger years. Over the past five decades, the country’s economy has matured and, like all mature advanced economies, it has slowed and mellowed. We face relentless challenges to our competitiveness as emerging global whippersnappers nip at our heels.
Still, a national celebration is not typically the time and place to dwell on the obstacles that lie in our future. And while that future looks quite different from how it looked in 1967, there are, nevertheless, some very good reasons to feel optimistic about where the Canadian economy is going.
Among mature economies, Canada finds itself in a better position than most of its advanced-world peers to thrive over the next several years. Over the past 12 months, Canada has boasted the fastest-growing economy in the G7, a mantle it could well maintain over the next 12 months. It has emerged from the oil shock with a more balanced economy poised for healthier, more broad-based growth.
And despite the regular laments about the country’s loss of competitiveness in global markets, Canada possesses enviable attributes that should give it a leg up on many of its peers in sustaining growth and prosperity over the next several years.
“I think there is a lot of cause for optimism,” says Elyse Allan, president and CEO of General Electric Co.’s Canadian unit, a manufacturing and technology giant that employs more than 7,000 people here. “I think we have a lot of the fundamentals that are so important. The question is, do we continue to sustain those? I bet we do.”
“I’m very optimistic. It doesn’t mean we don’t have challenges, but I think we’re very fortunate,” says Dominic Barton, managing director of global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and chairman of the Advisory Council on Economic Growth, a group of private-sector business and economic experts set up last year to advise the federal government on economic policy. “We’ve got an incredible endowment that fits with a lot of the longer-term trends in the way the world is going.”
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/rep.../canada-150-economy-optimism/article35523695/
Good times are back (and they’re going to get a lot better)
The last time Canada celebrated a landmark birthday – the centennial in 1967 – it was riding one of the great economic booms of its history.
The economy grew at an average real rate of more than 5 per cent annually in the 1950s and 1960s, as the baby boom and leaps in consumer technology kept the foot on the economic accelerator. That growth wave was cresting as the centennial approached, averaging 6.5 per cent in the three years leading up to the big birthday.
Indeed, the government’s chief concern in the mid-1960s was that the economy was growing too fast. It was worried about how to keep the party going, without it getting out of hand.
“We can all take satisfaction from the fact that our problems are no longer the problems of overcoming slackness or stagnation, but those of managing growth and prosperity. Our task is to sustain the longest economic expansion in Canadian history,” then-finance minister Mitchell Sharp said in his 1966 budget speech.
But by the time Dominion Day, 1967, arrived, the best of that growth was already behind us. The glory days of postwar expansion soon gave way to the tumultuous 1970s, and generally tamer and choppier growth in the ensuing three decades.
Today, as the country turns 150, things look quite different. Slow growth and even stagnation have been recurring themes for the economy ever since the 2008-09 Great Recession, a period of unsteady recovery that, for Canada, was extended by the major setback of the 2014-15 oil shock. With Canada’s population growth fading, the huge boomer generation beginning to retire and the country’s postwar manufacturing boom an increasingly distant memory, it’s unlikely that Canada will ever return to the kind of growth it enjoyed in its younger years. Over the past five decades, the country’s economy has matured and, like all mature advanced economies, it has slowed and mellowed. We face relentless challenges to our competitiveness as emerging global whippersnappers nip at our heels.
Still, a national celebration is not typically the time and place to dwell on the obstacles that lie in our future. And while that future looks quite different from how it looked in 1967, there are, nevertheless, some very good reasons to feel optimistic about where the Canadian economy is going.
Among mature economies, Canada finds itself in a better position than most of its advanced-world peers to thrive over the next several years. Over the past 12 months, Canada has boasted the fastest-growing economy in the G7, a mantle it could well maintain over the next 12 months. It has emerged from the oil shock with a more balanced economy poised for healthier, more broad-based growth.
And despite the regular laments about the country’s loss of competitiveness in global markets, Canada possesses enviable attributes that should give it a leg up on many of its peers in sustaining growth and prosperity over the next several years.
“I think there is a lot of cause for optimism,” says Elyse Allan, president and CEO of General Electric Co.’s Canadian unit, a manufacturing and technology giant that employs more than 7,000 people here. “I think we have a lot of the fundamentals that are so important. The question is, do we continue to sustain those? I bet we do.”
“I’m very optimistic. It doesn’t mean we don’t have challenges, but I think we’re very fortunate,” says Dominic Barton, managing director of global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and chairman of the Advisory Council on Economic Growth, a group of private-sector business and economic experts set up last year to advise the federal government on economic policy. “We’ve got an incredible endowment that fits with a lot of the longer-term trends in the way the world is going.”
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/rep.../canada-150-economy-optimism/article35523695/