Canada’s GDP Drop Signals Trouble
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Summary
In this episode, I'm joined by Mike Wixson to discuss the devastating 0.3% decline in GDP in October, which is the worst monthly decline since 2011. We talk about what happened, why it happened, and what we can do about it.
Transcript
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Today on True Patriot Love, Under the Pillar Economy, I'm joined by Mike Wixson to go over
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what happened in October. We saw a 0.3% decrease in our GDP, which is probably one of the biggest
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GDP decreases we've seen since 2022. Hi, Mike. How's it going? Good, good. I appreciate you
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you know what? I like being the guy in this seat because you make clarity of what tends to come
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out in charts I don't understand out there often. So I appreciate this. Yeah, no, thanks for joining
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me. You know what? It was a funny month because we remember back to October, things slowed down a
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little. We were kind of at the point where we had seen the bubble from tariffs. People had gone and
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stockpiled all their goods and then all of a sudden the economy started to slow. So we
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particularly saw a manufacturing dip. We saw the the wood industry go. You know, we heard a lot about
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remember we heard a lot about subsidizing the wood industry. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Soft lumber,
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lumber, all that stuff. So we saw that manufacturing. We talked a lot about auto product manufacturing,
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how all that had started to slow down. So we saw the decline in that. And you know what? We saw the
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construction industry just disappear in October. You know, we started to hear about condos, the
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unwinding of the condo industry, and then boom, right? The overall drop we understood to be 0.3%.
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That's an enormous drop across all these categories. For a monthly change. Yes, it is. And again,
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we hadn't seen anything like that since the early, you know, 2020s. And, you know, that kind of alarmed
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everyone. Now, this hasn't been something that we haven't been tracking. We haven't been talking
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about because Deloitte, for example, I get a circular from them every month. They're predicting,
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you know, a mild recession. I don't know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't know how you classify a mild
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recession. But they've been saying for a while. We're mildly pregnant. Yeah, we're mildly pregnant.
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But they are saying, you know, they're expecting the bubble to burst and to get a few back-to-back
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recession defined as several months of back-to-back decline in GDP. Over half the sectors that were,
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I guess, polled or researched on this reported decline. 11 out of 20. Wow. So, and that's
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interesting because if you look back since last October, so if you look back a year 2024, October,
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and you go forward, out of those 12 months, six of those 12 months were a significant decline in GDP.
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So, it's not something we hadn't seen coming. And people, again, you know, we're here, we talk so
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much about the tariff impacts and what's happening with the tariffs. We've been in this malaise for a
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while, right? This isn't something new that was Donald Trump related. This is something that our
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economy was starting to see some bumps. So, when we got to the fall of 2024, I knew it. I started to
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see it. And, you know, we were talking about it. So, it's not something that wasn't an indicator.
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Like, if in 2024, you were starting to see pretty serious indicators of this happening
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month over month, and you can start to see this on the horizon, this is a couple of years
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of getting to that point. It feels like maybe we've made some bad choices between here and
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Well, and we did some things to actually kind of mask it. So, if you look at, there were
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some months where we'd increase military spending, which would just get us back positive by like
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a tiny bit. We'd increase, you know, housing subsidies, which would just get us back. So,
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we'd have one really negative month, and then all of a sudden, you know, there'd be government
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spending, or there'd be some program that would kick in. So, we saw a year of kind of up and down
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Well, this chart that you point out to me just a little bit earlier, and we'll put it up right
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now for you to have a look at, this is an interesting one because it shows so many months that we've
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Yeah. So, those are the six, you know, six out of 12 months that we did go below the line
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that we were trying to manage through. Now, GDP. So, let's make sure, because a lot of people out
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there always ask me the question, you know, what's the difference between real and nominal GDP?
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So, we're talking real GDP. So, which has been inflation adjusted. So, inflation isn't impacting
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the numbers. So, you know, so we're not seeing months where we have more inflation and less
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inflation. That's nominal GDP where inflation's already in that. It's not adjusted out. And,
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you know, GDP, for those of you kind of new to the term or, you know, just remembering it again.
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We hear it a lot, but GDP is a number of sectors, right? So, whether it's services, manufacturing,
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natural resources, construction. So, what they do is they basically, it's like a surveying.
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They go through the key industries. They take the economic volume. So, the revenues, they compile
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them. StatsCan does a really good job of doing this. They do it on a monthly basis and they basically
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say, okay, I'm going to take the top 90% of an industry. So, let's take agriculture. And they
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take 90% of the agricultural companies, they record their revenue for the month, and then they're able
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to determine whether the industry is going up or down. Right. So, they do know a dollar value on GDP,
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which is great. And they can then go from month to month and they can compare the two.
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And so, it's a- When you remove the inflation from that overall number though, what does that leave
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us with? It leaves us with a baseline GDP. So, basically, it leaves us with the GDPs that's
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adjusted out for inflation. So, for example, say if in the agricultural industry, inflation hits
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harder than in the construction industry. Okay.
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Or otherwise, it takes that number out. So, it's kind of apples to apples versus apples to inflated
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So, it takes it out. So, and that's why I like the real GDP. Now, you know, as you go through,
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and I think they've talked about quite a bit over the years, our GDP continues per capita to slip
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Well, so, we are kind of a group. We're part of a group. It's called the Organization of Economic
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and Cooperation and Development. So, you know, the acronym is OECD. So, to make it easy,
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it's developed countries. So, you know, we talk about non-developed countries and third world
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How many people are- How many countries are in this?
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Right. So, 38 countries in this. And we are, unfortunately, slipped to last.
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In the forecasted. So, the OECD is predicted between 20 and 30 will be in last place among
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Right? So, it's a scary figure. You know, it's been something-
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It's almost like we're not on that list almost.
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Well, you know, and I bring it up in previous shows, and I think through what they call the
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lost decade, even the finance minister, you know, Chrystia Friedland, who's now, you know,
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Yeah, that's right. She's a special envoy to Ukraine.
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She's now actually employed by the people she gave the money to.
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But, so, you know, the interesting part is that the growth, our growth in GDP has slipped
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to last place in the developed countries. And the real interesting part of that is that
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we've not really been worried about it, which is, to me, and I've said on numerous shows,
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the lost decade, even the liberal government, you know, she is the finance minister was saying,
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hey, you know, time out. We got to, we got to turn, you know, we got to turn.
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And they were trying to figure it out, but they weren't getting any programs in place to get it
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figured out. So now we've slipped to that bottom, bottom tier. So.
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Well, so, okay. So the U.S., that's interesting. Per capita. So what they do is they take GDP per
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capita and they compare us to the U.S. And the U.S. has been on this sharp increase and we've
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flattened off and went down. So we've, you know, we went the opposite direction. So GDP per capita,
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you know, is wide. And I've talked about on other shows, almost to the point where it's,
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I think, $8,000 per person per capita difference difference between the two countries. So if you
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look at it in 1970, we started off on the same plane. So we were in the same position. And then
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over, you know, decades, we've just constantly, we've divided, divided, divided the U.S. climbing,
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we sort of stabilizing or, you know, leveling and then going down, unfortunately. So not a good
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predictor. And quite frankly, it doesn't help us going into this economic climate, which, you know,
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is a, as Deloitte says, will be some type of recession. Not only that, but it does seem to
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add a little bit of fuel to the flames for Trump in any sort of negotiation he does. I mean, I can
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almost hear him saying, your GDP is dead. You've got no GDP. Well, yeah, that's the, that's the
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whole bargaining chip. Well, that's interesting because, you know, there's a couple, a couple
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indicators of the cause GDP decline. So there's a number of indicators that cause GDP decline. But
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one of the key ones is capital investment in your own country. And we've unfortunately managed to go
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the opposite direction. So we spend more money investing in other countries than we do in our
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own country. And that's, that's very bizarre. So even our CPP, which we've talked about on other
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shows, 50% of that is invested in the U S and not Canada. So I looked into that. There's not
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another country on earth that would invest more outside of their own country than they do. And
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yeah, which is bizarre. So, so that's been kind of the challenge. Our, our, our basic, our capital
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investment. So our capital investment into the country has managed to go down. So as your product
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productivity decreases and your productivity is a function of labor and resources. So, and technology,
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of course, in the innovative technology. So those are the kind of the three components that make up
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your productivity in your country. Um, our labor, you know, our labor, uh, productivity has gotten
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scarily low. We don't do any manufacturing. We don't do many manufacturing. So the level of
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manufacturing do is sunk, uh, sorry to manufacturers in this nation, but you're among a really rare
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group. You're in rare air if that's what you do. But if you're not, you're not manu, if you're not
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manufacturing anything, you're not spending capital. So they kind of go hand in hand, right? So now I'm
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not building anything or I'm not manufacturing anything. Am I going to buy machines, buy equipment?
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Am I going to worry about innovation? Am I going to try to make that widget better?
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Do I need to construct a new building? Do I need more warehouse space? Do I need more drivers?
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Like, yeah, all of that is impacted. Well, we have done, which is interesting. So that's an
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interesting one on the real estate side. We do do a lot of storage. And, uh, so we do build a lot
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of things to store things. We don't build a lot of places to manufacture things. So our, our, you know,
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we've seen over the years, it's come to an end, but our residential construction was a booming industry.
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Oh yeah. Our commercial was a booming industry only from a perspective of storage, not a perspective of
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manufacturing. So that, that was interesting. You say that in many parts of this country,
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as you leave the outskirts of the core of the city and you get to the main, uh, transport areas,
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we have huge warehouses. Yeah. Uh, a lot of the Amazon warehouses, there's warehouses in this country
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that cover, cover square kilometers. Yes. It's remarkable. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know,
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even, uh, Mississauga by me, uh, it's amazing even over the last few years coming out of COVID,
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the amount of storage that we've, we've built and you see them, I, you know, you wonder who
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speculate that with me. What's in them? Why are we doing that? Are we a hub for the world for
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distribution? I don't think so. Are we storing product that we're going to buy in the future?
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I think we thought, well, coming out of COVID, I think we thought we had supply management
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challenges. So, so I think a lot of that was just, you know, did, uh, that was the perception.
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I think we built to meet a demand, uh, or a supply issue that probably wasn't there in the end.
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So now I think a lot of those are sitting empty. You don't see many people around those
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buildings anymore. You see them kind of vacant with 10 cars at most.
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Yeah. It seems like they're just a storage space, um, on occasion.
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Yeah. That's, and there's so much of it anyway. It's interesting. And I think we should take a
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look at back down the road. What's, what are we warehousing in Canada that we have so much space?
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Exactly. The other one, um, I wanted to bring up, and this is on the GDP front per capita,
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is that when you look across the country, you know, you, we seem to think for years, we had Ontario,
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uh, was a boom for manufacturing, uh, Alberta for oil and gas. So since 2019, we basically, um,
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have not had a, uh, province grow above the 2% mark. So all 10 provinces, right. That we have,
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have not exceeded that. There's no superstar. There's no superstar. In fact, Alberta, uh,
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since 2019 has been in a negative growth. Our oil and gas business has just not been happening.
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And that was, that was maybe the star actually. It was, and Ontario is slightly down. It's like
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0.1% down, but it's negative. So, and you know, the East coast, except for New Brunswick,
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you know, PEI is slightly up, but you know, that's not been positive either. So,
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so basically across the nation, even on a localized basis, there's no real relief at any one place in
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this country. No. Well, you know, that's a little frightening. It is frightening, but you know,
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we've tried to do a few things. We've tried to lower interest rates. We've, you know, given credits for,
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uh, manufacturing, you know, right now we're, as we talked about before the show, when we did the
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budget show, we gave a lot of tax breaks. So we came out for, you know, buy equipment, invest,
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innovation. Uh, we, we are trying to do things. The challenge right now is how fast will those kick in
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and then where are we going to end up the next few months as we go through into the winter
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when we do hit this recession in 2026, when technically we are in it. And then how deep do
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we go? So that becomes the question now, is it a mild recession? It is a deep recession.
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And then what does the government do? And, and if these programs, the tax credits and all these
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things that we put in the budget, don't kick in and don't kick in fast enough, which I think that was
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the, that was the budget sort of complaint from everyone is that it was two mile, not hard hitting
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enough and we were going to hit it. And it was lengthy in delivering. Exactly. Like it was long
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in the tooth by the time that they get there from the original concept. And frankly, it's an election
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period. Right. But we're into it now. So we're, we're basically into it. And how do you get
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productivity up? Because without people investing in machinery, innovation, we have an aging population
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growth. We have a high immigration, that's not product, hasn't been productive, quite frankly,
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to the country. So that's been a challenge. We haven't had a huge productivity from our immigration
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groups. Um, how do you get that stimulated again? And what programs do you follow? So we started
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looking into it and we said, okay, what happens? So this is an interesting thing. What do countries
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do, right? When they hit, uh, our circumstance? Yeah. You can, that's, that's my next question
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is like, okay, so we're here. Yeah. Can we get out of this? Is there, are there, is there a model
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out there? Sure. We've, you know, five, six, five that I can count, uh, since 1961, you know,
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recession, we've been in recessions before. This is a recession. That's a little different
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because we're, we're kind of missing a large portion of the baby boomers. Yeah. So this is,
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this is a little different. So, you know, I think we're underestimating my, my opinion.
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So Paul's opinion on this is we're underestimating how deep we're going to go on this. I think this
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is going to go deeper than what we thought. Since the last recession, correct me if I'm wrong on any
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of this, because I'm just a, an average Canadian guy looking at the numbers. But since the last
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recession, there's policies that make it different, difficult to mine. There's policies that are put in
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place to make it difficult to manufacture because you could be creating pollution of some sort.
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And all of this is necessary to have a protected world. And I understand, but a lot of industry
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restriction has come into place in almost every sector that does manufacturing, that does resource
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mining, uh, or, you know, pulls anything out of the ground. Do you think changing some of that
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and our policy in this country, just with the existing industries we have could be a tipping
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Oh, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. Here's the challenge we're going to hit. So
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we're going to dip. Leaders are going to have to make decisions. So whether it's cutting red tape,
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whether it's, uh, internal trade barriers, we've gone too slow. So we didn't hit it. We missed it. So,
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you know, we're in October, we've seen the dip. We, if we hit November, December, where the results
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are going to come out shortly, we'll know. So then they'll put, you know, they'll announce it. It'll
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be the, you know, the big news story of the day, which is imminent. Yeah. It'll come out and we'll
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be, and a lot of people will be like, wow, you know, why are we in a recession? Well, we just kind
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of explained why, here's how you got here. You know, you might want to share this with your friends
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when they say, I don't know how we got here. Here's here. Well, I've got something. So now you
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mentioned, uh, we've seen some examples and how they got out of there. Share some of those with me,
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if you don't mind. Sure. Well, you know, some hope, some hope. Well, you know, I don't know if
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it's hope, but it's, it's changing your economy. So a lot of times what, what countries do when they
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hit, uh, bad recessions is number one, they have to renegotiate their loans and debt and everything
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else. So like, uh, you know, I was looking just for some examples before the show and, you know,
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one popped, which I had forgotten about was in the 1997 Asian financial crisis when, uh, South Korea,
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uh, uh, took a bunch of loans from the IMF and they were defaulting on them. So they actually
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went to their citizens and requested that people donate gold. So gold, jewelry, gold.
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Wow. So, you know, everyone has to pony up. The citizens all ponied up actual gold.
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They pointed up valued, sold it, and they actually raised $2 billion to stay afloat. Um, which was,
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you know, that was a wake up call for a nation, like a huge wake up call for the nation to say,
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you know, yeah, we're really in trouble. Like this isn't funny. So they had to get together and
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they had to redevise, uh, business sectors. So one of the business sectors, which everyone will
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know is Korean cars. They've done really well. So they came out of no place with that. This must
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have been where, but you know, here's the nice part about what they did or the good part about what
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they did. Number one, they, they started building their own cars. Number two, they took the time to
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actually make sure the technology in those cars, the innovation, all the things that increased their
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productivity went into those cars. And from there, they created a nation that became more productive.
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So that was kind of the, that spurred them on to actually be more diligent and create an industry
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that then brought them through the recession. They created formulas for creating great product.
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Yeah. That they can put into other places. Yep. Yeah.
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So, and then the banks know how to lend against that formula. Exactly. Investors can have reliance
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on that. Yeah. The, the, the building process becomes formula. The employment process becomes
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formula. A reset like that is pretty good. Okay. Guys, give me your gold. Well, and well,
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here's the other thing. It, it actually is stimulated. The government stimulates it. And then the
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private, private enterprise takes it and runs with it. So that's the nice part of that because
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we're going to talk about this in a minute. A lot of countries don't do that. And that's
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also a challenge. Um, Iceland. So 2000 to 2000, I don't remember 2008 was terrible. The
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meltdown across the world, subprime mortgages, all that crazy stuff. But, uh, Iceland actually
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let their financial institutions collapse, their banks collapse. So they let them fail. They basically,
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uh, uh, uh, restarted, they hit the restart button. Right. And they devalued their currency and they
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devalued their currency to make themselves more attractive as a trading partner. I don't know if
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you remember, you know, remember the spa days in Iceland. Oh yeah. You could, I was going to say
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they really, they took advantage of this in so many ways because tourism opened up, airlines opened up.
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Yeah. They built a new airport, uh, international, uh, runway so that people could, it became a tourist
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attraction around the world. Yeah. 200 bucks. You were in Iceland, you know, you $80 a night,
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you, you know, one of the most incredible scenery, uh, locations on earth. Great coal plunges. Yeah.
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Yeah. So Iceland really took advantage of it. So, you know, that's one way Australia. So let's talk
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with that. So then when Australia, this was in the 2022 Australia probably did it a different way,
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which didn't end up for them, did not going well at all. So they just gave cash subsidies.
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So one of the things, one of the main things they did is they gave everyone 900 bucks.
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And I think we learned from Justin Trudeau that quite frankly, giving cash to citizens as a pure
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stimulus never works, right? It doesn't cause it's probably the goofiest idea I've ever heard in my life.
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Okay. We've taken your money. Yes. At a high rate that you don't want to pay in the first place in
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taxes. Uh, don't worry. We're going to give some back. What can't you work this out better than that?
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Yeah. Well, and, and they took the interesting thing is the other, uh, flip side of that is they
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took significant loans from China and then they actually paid them off with resources or they're
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still paying them off with resources. So they kind of, uh, took their resource, the country's resources,
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which were vast Australia. Yeah. And sold them basically to the Chinese in return for the loans
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to bail them out of the meltdown. So they used their resources to save the nation?
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Anybody? Anybody? Well, it is an interesting approach. I don't know, you know, and this is
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interesting because, you know, that was in a climate where we were totally different and there were,
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there was no anxiety about Western hemisphere protection, you know, and if this was happening
00:23:56.620
at another time, that would be something I'd throw on the table right away. But right now, um,
00:24:01.740
you know, on the show a few, uh, a month ago, we actually went through the national defense paper
00:24:08.140
of the United States. Um, they want nothing to do. They went to, they were basically saying they
00:24:13.900
won't allow that now. Yeah. So they won't allow, uh, an economic bailout of a country, uh, in the
00:24:20.060
Western hemisphere. Yeah. So they're time out. We're not doing that anymore. You, you will,
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00:24:26.700
in that paper that they published, uh, basically you will buy your goods and resources from the United
00:24:31.980
States. You will take loans from the United States. You will partner with the United States.
00:24:35.500
That's the way they see the world. It's very interesting because Australia seems to
00:24:38.940
be doing very well with the resources right now. So whatever investment went in from whatever
00:24:43.500
countries and, uh, they are mining. Well, productivity, right? So, you know,
00:24:49.580
if you look at the pride of productivity factors by industry, mining is one of the highest. So it takes
00:24:55.420
people, it takes innovation, it takes resources, it takes machinery. It's a, it's a great stimulator
00:25:01.340
for productivity that actually stimulates GDP. So they kickstarted it after a bad, you know,
00:25:08.300
after a bad downturn and it actually stimulated growth. They also, you know, leadership wise,
00:25:13.980
um, right now they have a, they have a great prime minister, quite frankly, he's doing a really good
00:25:18.860
job. Uh, very humble, very, you know, uh, focused on the work, focused on the work, uh, not, not needing
00:25:25.980
the money, quite frankly. So doing it because he wants to better the country. So, which is great.
00:25:32.460
Germany. I remember this in 2008, right? And I, and I'm not picking, this was a weird one to not
00:25:37.900
picking on Germany, but Germany always is an interesting test case in everything. When you
00:25:41.660
read it, I always, when I, when I read the German economic stats all the time, it's so interesting
00:25:46.780
to me the way they look at things. So, um, in 2008, what they did is they basically reduced work times.
00:25:55.420
Oh, so to kind of increase, they thought that they would increase their productivity
00:26:01.500
and, uh, they didn't have enough work in the country because the slowdown
00:26:07.660
that they would actually have people work like 30 hours a week. Right.
00:26:10.940
Uh, it, it was a horrifically bad idea, um, that it turned out to have another many social
00:26:18.460
consequences. Well, yeah, I can imagine it did. People left Germany for other jobs. I mean,
00:26:23.180
they lost a brain trust and, and a talent base through it. Yeah. Uh, it, it changed the work
00:26:28.460
ethic for a period of time in Germany, as I recall. Yeah. I thought, I felt this one was a strange one.
00:26:33.900
And, uh, you pointed it out. We actually did it here. We did Ray days. Yeah. We were,
00:26:38.300
remember we were on that in Ontario at one point, we were on a path to do it. And all of a sudden
00:26:43.740
the citizens of Ontario were like, Oh, get out of here. The businesses went bananas. I'm not paying
00:26:48.540
people for, and remember the, the idea was that the businesses would pay people for the time off
00:26:54.540
and not to work. Yeah. So you would still make the same income. You just wouldn't work as much.
00:26:59.580
Yeah. And so how, and the business were like, well, how's that going to increase my product,
00:27:03.420
productivity, my profitability. I still have to hire another shift. How am I going to,
00:27:07.180
yeah. How am I going to buy capital or reinvest? It didn't make any sense. Right.
00:27:16.060
Yeah. Germany did support, but they did it. And, and now they're doing, you know,
00:27:19.740
now they've kind of went into, uh, government sustained programs. So, which I think are helping
00:27:27.820
the country, you know, to come back, but it's been a tough comeback for them, um, since 2008.
00:27:33.580
And they have a lot of government supported projects.
00:27:38.460
If you have debt in the country, it always seems to me that you're just building more debt.
00:27:42.540
I, I think unless you're manufacturing, unless you're doing something, unless you're producing
00:27:48.220
something, you don't really, your startup, your restart. First of all, you might not end up closer
00:27:53.900
to a recession, but even if you have to bump out of a recession, it's your resources,
00:27:59.020
your manufacturing, your price per product, and all of that, that's going to really save your country.
00:28:03.740
Yeah. Well, it's interesting. So, you know, it's how deep your recession goes. So this, this is,
00:28:08.540
you know, if you look at the lessons learned from the 1930s to 2008, you know, depression to recession.
00:28:15.580
Yeah. Um, you know, as you get deeper into your recession and closer to depression,
00:28:20.460
quite frankly, you have to stimulate those projects. So, you know, the U S you know, we saw it,
00:28:25.900
you know, 1930s, they, you know, had to actually start to build major projects, you know, the,
00:28:32.460
whether it be the Hoover Dam or roads, highways, all those good things, you know, they had to create
00:28:38.460
big, massive projects to be put people back to work, uh, and get companies moving again to jolt
00:28:44.460
the economy. So that was a huge jolt. They had to get going to get people back.
00:28:47.900
They also had a boost of immigration. They needed to get to work at that time as well.
00:28:51.420
Yeah. I mean, they, they really were in that situation where, well, but you look at Canada,
00:28:55.820
so let's stop for a minute. Cause you know, it's interesting. We have, you know, baby boomers.
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00:29:01.900
We've talked about another shows make up roughly 20% of the population. So kids, you know, make up
00:29:10.220
another 15%. So that's 35 and then unemployed. So we're projecting EI to go up to 10%.
00:29:18.860
And then people who are just not on the EI role, just have left, you know, their welfare or just
00:29:26.700
left the economy. So we're right now, 50% of Canadians are supporting a hundred percent of the pie.
00:29:34.780
Yeah. So we're, we're kind of getting a scary, you know, that's the scary math, you know, it's an
00:29:41.900
estimate, but it's a scary, uh, projection because you're having, uh, as it surpasses the 50% mark,
00:29:49.020
you're having a very small part of the population supporting the whole pie.
00:29:52.700
So the, you know, the reason again, our productivity low is so low is that our unemployment's high,
00:29:58.620
our aging population. These are all the things that we're kind of dealing with in this country
00:30:03.340
right now that are causing GDP per capita to drop. And it's, it hasn't been right now. It's been over
00:30:11.660
Yeah. It's, uh, interesting because you talk about the United States coming out of the great
00:30:16.140
depression and building these big projects. The projects that they did for infrastructure were the,
00:30:21.340
the Hoover dam and they, they, uh, you know, short up all of their national parks and they build a
00:30:26.300
highways and, and, uh, rail systems and, uh, commuter rail systems. And they really got to work
00:30:32.380
building out a country that wasn't already in the outskirts. They built train stations where there
00:30:38.460
would be towns. They built monuments that would drive Americans to want to drive across their new
00:30:46.140
It made a huge difference for productivity. So you see, that's the leadership piece.
00:30:51.020
If you build a highway, you reduce, uh, you increase productivity because you don't have
00:30:55.820
people sitting on the highway, right? You don't have people not wanting to drive the
00:30:59.260
highway to go to work. So now all of a sudden you have more people working, more people getting
00:31:02.780
there faster. So you create methods to actually get people to their work, get people to invest in
00:31:08.700
their work, uh, logistics, getting materials to factories.
00:31:12.380
So expanding the industrial area in which your country works.
00:31:17.740
Exactly. So that's the key, right? That's the, if you look at a lot of, uh, great, uh,
00:31:22.860
rebounds from recessions, it is people who thought about actually increasing their productivity
00:31:28.140
first. And that's, that's, you know, coming through this and talking about this today,
00:31:33.500
the one thing that keeps coming to mind, we need to set us,
00:31:37.900
we need to start setting some indicators, benchmarks that we look at every month.
00:31:43.660
And we say, okay, we got to hit these because if you don't drive towards those goals for the
00:31:48.460
country, whether it be a GDP per capita growth, whether it be, uh, PPE, uh, you know, whatever
00:31:56.380
we determine that we want to look at, we need to actually set those and drive those benchmarks
00:32:01.580
forward. And by doing that, we can do similar to what they did coming out of the depression. They,
00:32:08.380
If you're building bridges, you've built steel companies, you've, uh, trained people for the
00:32:13.180
next project that comes in. So if you say to a Germany, we can do the bridge, uh, here, we can
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00:32:19.500
build this, we can use our expertise, our steel, and our, you're already ready to go. And that
00:32:24.380
productivity of having those trained people and the, the plant built and the systems in place to
00:32:29.820
transport it, that must increase your productivity and your economy.
00:32:34.060
Exactly. And, but, and also as we do that, it's actually starting to report.
00:32:39.340
And this is, you know, we, we talked about this on another show, Mike,
00:32:43.100
it's actually the PR around doing it. You remember, you remember when they were coming
00:32:47.740
out of the great depression, the amount of PR, you know, we're building dams, we're building
00:32:52.220
highways, we're building roads. We are America, right? Remember that whole,
00:32:59.340
Come to Palm Springs. The highway is now here. Yeah. The route 66 is now ready to go.
00:33:05.420
Exactly. You remember those, you know, the, the advertising, the PR around those,
00:33:10.460
and that is when you get a nation kind of coming back. And so I think as we, you know, as the next
00:33:16.380
few months go by and we're going to do, uh, every month when we get the GDP results, we're going to
00:33:21.100
actually go through them. I think what we need to talk about and what we need to start focusing on
00:33:26.700
is, okay, we're here. You know, did we all want to be in last place in the, in the OECD? No. In the
00:33:33.900
developed country world, out of 38 countries, did we want to have, be projected to have the lowest GDP
00:33:39.820
growth? No, none of us wanted to do that, but we are here. How do we build it back? And what are the
00:33:45.660
plans that we have to do? And what do we recommend to the government to do? That's the other thing.
00:33:50.300
I think that, uh, even I'm hoping that this episode focuses somebody in, uh, you know, one of the,
00:33:57.340
one of the advisory, uh, research houses or, or think tanks here in this country to say,
00:34:05.500
you know what? I think Canadians are ready to focus on getting up that ladder two or three rungs
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00:34:12.540
every couple of years just to get ourselves back into play. We don't need to be the top of the list,
00:34:17.500
although we were near, uh, for many years just to make our way closer to the, uh, to the top of that
00:34:24.140
list. We have to do some things. I hope that this inspires that. Thank you for doing this. I agree.
00:34:29.100
Thank you, Mike. And for those of you, we're going to be doing, uh, a show every month when the GDP
00:34:34.220
results come out from stats Canada. So please, uh, stay tuned, watch, subscribe, uh, and, and let's,
00:34:40.940
if you have any ideas. So I always say at the end of every show, you know, write us, let's talk about
00:34:46.380
it because the more creative we are, the more innovative we are, the faster we get out of this
00:34:51.340
challenge. I'm glad to know that GDP does not stand for a great deal pickles. Like I thought.