A casual look at Figure 1, Canadian GDP performance since 1997 suggests
- that the economy dipped in 2008 led by the goods producing industries exposed to the capital accessibility shutdown of the Global Financial Crisis
- the economic downturn led by the pandemic shutdown of most client-facing services during the covid-19 crisis
- the goods sector was also impact by supply chain disruptions also related to labour availability
- by 2023 the economy had recovered to its simple twenty year linear trend
In both cases the economy returned to its simple linear trends after a couple of years. The public sector including general government services, health and education has a slight dip but otherwise contributes stability to the economy throughout the period.
The economic recovery was more complex for the individual provinces and territories. There are 10 provinces and three territories in Canada. Duplicating the national presentation involves 13 separate graphs, each with four economic sectors including All Industries. To simplify the presentation each jurisdiction’s economic sector’s value in 2019, the last year before the pandemic, is set to 100. Each sector values for each jurisdiction was calibrated to 2019=100: a value below 100 means that the sector is below its pre-pandemic value, and had recovered to its pre-pandemic value once the value equals of exceeds 100. The recalibration was done for each of the four years following 2019. Only 2023 is presented in Table 1, the other years are presented in attached spreadsheet file for downloading.
| Public Sector | Service Producing Sector | Goods Producing Sector | All Industries | |
| NL | 105.1 | 101.7 | 81.3 | 92.5 |
| PE | 111.3 | 111.2 | 109.8 | 110.8 |
| NS | 108.1 | 107.1 | 99.9 | 105.7 |
| NB | 106.5 | 104.4 | 104.3 | 104.3 |
| QC | 108.8 | 106.5 | 99.4 | 104.5 |
| ON | 109.0 | 106.9 | 101.6 | 105.6 |
| MB | 105.1 | 104.0 | 96.3 | 101.9 |
| SK | 107.4 | 105.2 | 97.9 | 102.5 |
| AB | 105.6 | 103.3 | 102.7 | 103.1 |
| BC | 115.0 | 110.0 | 108.0 | 109.5 |
| YT | 113.5 | 108.4 | 159.3 | 118.6 |
| NT | 111.0 | 101.5 | 88.7 | 97.8 |
| NU | 110.4 | 104.2 | 127.9 | 115.6 |
Table 1 indicates that by 2023
1. two jurisdictions, Newfoundland & Labrador and the Northwest Territories had not recovered to their 2019 economic levels by 2023.
2. in all jurisdictions the public sector had returned to or exceeded pre-pandemic levels by 2023.
3. the three prairie provinces had experienced only a mediocre recovery with drag from the goods producing sector.
4. to have maintained a 2 percent linear rate of growth the recalibrated index would need to maintain a value of 108.2 in year 2023. Only two provinces, Prince Edward Island and British Columbia, and two territories, Nunavut and Yukon, met the modest growth rate.
The associated working spreadsheet.
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