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If y'all keep listening to conservatives and businessmen, you're going to catch down to the United States of America
βEconomic growth does not necessarily equate to economic prosperity,β TD economist Marc Ercolao wrote
This is what I'm talking about. This is the second line in an article that spends the entire time talking about a decline in economic growth as a proxy for standard of living. Changes in GDP don't mean shit if the wealth isn't fairly distributed
The standard of living is falling because the massive middle class is being looted by the .01%. Trillions of dollars have been funneled up to the ultra rich during the pandemic and afterward, and nothing is trickling down.
And governments around the world are enabling and assisting it, including in Canada at the federal and provincial (and municipal) levels.
"Middle class" is a myth the ruling class uses to keep the working class in the working class. If you don't own your own means of production, and you don't wield political power, you're working class.
While in no way intending to minimize the economic hardship inflation has had on Canadianβs lives, to be clear, this is βstandard of livingβ defined as real GDP per capita.
That is it measures the arithmetic mean or average of what the economy produces adjusted for general inflation. It says nothing about how income or wealth is distributed or other key factors that determine wellbeing at an individual, household or societal level.
This is not generally viewed as the best measure of quality of life or societal wellbeing. Critics from across the political spectrum globally have been critical of the focus on GDP per capita for decades. It says something that TD as a bank is still focused on it.
The OECD Finance Ministers adopted a Wellbeing Framework to measure and compare across countries. Canada has its own version that StatsCan is reporting on.
Thanks for pointing that out! GDP figures are easy to collect and analyze which is why economists like them so much, but you're absolutely right that they don't show the entire picture.
For wealth inequality, the Gini Coefficient is a common measure. In the linked wiki article you can see Canada is in line with the UK and Germany for being middle of the road whereas places like US, Russia, and Saudia Arabia have incredibly high income inequality.
The OECD Wellbeing Framework uses both the GINI and a measure of health disparities (differential in life expectancy) as measures of equity.
There is a significant consensus that if a country were to look at a single measure alone, trends and changes in life satisfaction would be the best one. For comparisons between countries, itβs less helpful though.
Some kids where I live have pediatricians. My 1 yr old son sees a public health nurse for vaccines, goes to emergency when something is wrong and i sneak him in for checkups when I have an appointment with my nurse practitioner, because pediatricians (and doctors in general) are in short supply.
$10/day daycare sounds great, unless your kid isn't already enrolled. Waitlists are mostly closed. I've called a dozen daycares at least and I'm on the waiting list for two, basically hoping for a string of cancellations.
This gap in the market has resulted in a boom of unregulated daycares in random people's houses! What could possibly go wrong with that?
Cost of electricity is going up. Not because of oil prices, but because ratepayers need to pay (and pay and pay) for a government/crown corp boondoggle. But don't worry, the people who pushed it all through can afford the rate hike, and solar panels and wind turbines and batteries to boot.
My standard of living has been declining for at least a decade.
Remote Native communities in Canada listening in to this debate ....
No shit Sherlock. Food cost keep rising when grocery stores make record profits. Shrinkflation is the new trend to blind the unaware consumer. House and lodging cost is insane and the government is watching everything burn.
The hole is getting deeper ...
absolutely. gas, rent, and groceries just costs so much now, itβs terrible.
Watch your grocery shopping... it's incredibly frustrating and depressing. Everyday things like... say a flat of chicken breast from Save-On. Not so long ago that flat of meat was about $7-$8 for 1kg. Now you get 650g for $14. Every item you buy has dramatically reduced in size/weight and doubled in price.
Considering how GDP is measured, this is more a sign of the real estate slowdown and the collapse of the O&G/fisheries industries than anything else.
What's more worrying is the lack of growth in Ontario/Quebec, which should be the economic engine of Canada.
Indeed, as literally spelled out:
The report states that the decline is largely related to productivity. Regions like Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador, where the economy relies heavily on the exchange of commodities, used to have the highest GDP per person, TD says. Over the past ten years, however, their lead has been challenged. Following the pandemic, only B.C. and P.E.I. have been able to raise their GDP per person levels they had in the years prior to COVID-19, TD reports.
This is a headline just because there's this catchy tradition of saying "standard of living = GDP per capita" which is misleading.
Grocery and housing costs are getting out of control.
Have been for awhile, now it's just insane.
Watched a video with this lady showing how much things were in a small town in Alaska... Not far off the prices here in Vancouver.
Lived in the GVRD. Thought "this is way too expensive, everyone is saying Alberta is so much cheaper" so we put things in storage and went to Alberta. Six months in, we discovered...
After six months we moved back to BC. The small difference in housing costs made so little impact to our monthly COL, that it wasn't worth it. We paid WAY more for car insurance and electricity - so much so that any savings we saw in housing costs were totally eclipsed by other expenses.
They aren't getting there, they've been there for a long time. Housing was already starting to get ridiculous circa 2013.
Imagine failing to provide of the most basic of commodities to your population so that rich people and boomers can trade theirs like NFTs... while real estate agents and other assortment of critters are able to extract large fees on per trade basis because fuck you peasants, that's why!
But I'm sure its young people fault they can't save money, afford rent/mortgage and move out of their parents house. If things don't turn around soon I think a lot of young people will end up leaving this country in search of a life that isn't just scraping by.
Id be curious to know where it's better. I feel like this trend is bad in other countries, though maybe not quite Canada level yet.
Some other countries have cities with denser design and good urban planing and transit so even comparable rents and food prices can compete as car ownership isn't essential. The US has places far behind us in housing prices and tech sectors often pay higher salaries than in Canada.