Canadians suffered a recession during Trudeau’s ‘insane’ immigration policies: economist

Canada was already in a per-capita recession during Justin Trudeau's final years in office. RBC Economics confirmed it. The headline GDP numbers looked relatively firm only because of the most extraordinary immigration surge Canada had ever seen. 3.2% population growth in 2023, almost entirely from immigration, the highest rate since 1957. Jim and Iain were saying this at the time. Now Statistics Canada has confirmed it. And today Bloomberg confirmed labour productivity fell 0.5% in Q1 2026, the second consecutive quarterly decline. Hours worked went up. Output went down. Unit labour costs jumped 1.4%. The textbook definition of a stagflation setup. And David Cochrane thinks it is all just fine.

Topics covered:
► RBC Economics confirming that Canadians experienced the conditions of a recession between 2022 and 2024 even as record-breaking immigration numbers propped up headline GDP figures, with per-capita conditions indistinguishable from a recession during a period the economy ostensibly appeared to be growing

► Canada's population growing 3.2% in 2023, the highest rate since 1957, driven almost entirely by immigration, a figure Jim and Iain compare to the population explosions of Victorian London and post-industrial America, and which Carney has himself acknowledged was juicing GDP figures

► Statistics Canada confirming today that business sector labour productivity fell 0.5% in Q1 2026, following a 0.3% decline in Q4 2025, the second consecutive quarterly decline, with hours worked increasing while output declined, and unit labour costs jumping 1.4%, the fourth consecutive quarterly increase now up 3.2% year over year

► Jim and Iain's stagflation warning: productivity falling while labour costs rise and the economy is in recession is the textbook recipe for stagflation, the combination of rising inflation and shrinking output, which Jim says is the next story the media will try to tell Canadians is not really happening

► David Cochrane of CBC playing down the recession on camera, referencing the 2015 Harper technical recession, with Jim and Iain pointing out he is doing exactly what he is supposed to do: defending the institution that pays his mortgage

► The productivity explanation Jim and Iain offer for general audiences: labour productivity is simply how much valuable output is produced per person, Canada's chronic underperformance is directly connected to replacing skilled investment-led growth with low-skilled immigration-led population growth, and the number one driver of genuine productivity gains is technology and capital investment, both of which have been in structural decline in Canada since 2015

► Business capital investment falling for a fifth consecutive quarter in Q1 2026, described by Jim and Iain as one of the most important charts they have been showing for years, representing the trillion dollars of investment capital that has fled south to the United States

► 24,000 children walking into a food bank today. One in three food bank users is a child. 2.2 million monthly visits nationally. 11% of Canadians below the poverty line. Jim and Iain on who paid the price for the immigration policy that benefited Tim Hortons, A&W, Rogers, Conestoga College, and the Laurentian elite

► Jim and Iain's core argument: the people who benefited from the last decade were the insiders, the corporate lobbyists, and the liberal-connected institutions. The people who paid for it are the Canadians visiting food banks, the young people who cannot find jobs, the families who cannot afford housing, and the workers whose wages were suppressed by imported labour competing for the same positions

If Canada was already in a recession for years before Statistics Canada confirmed it, will we hold those responsible for hiding it to account?

Let us know what you think in the comments.

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