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It’s all theatre, you understand. The parts were handed out months ago. First, somebody — a bank economist, perhaps, or the International Monetary Fund — declares Canada is in recession, or is about to be, or could very well be hard to say really it depends.

Then, the people in my business pile on, examining every passing bit of economic data for its recession-confirming potential. At length we begin to tire of this, at which point the action shifts to seeing if we can goad the finance minister into saying the word, if only to say, “We are not in recession.” And if it should turn out, months later when the figures are actually out, that he was right? Well, who remembers that?

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Are we in recession? I don’t know, and neither do you. The evidence is, to say the least, mixed. Output declined through the first four months of the year, it is true; as of April, gross domestic product was down by a total of two-thirds of a percentage point, after inflation, from its December peak. On the other hand, employment is up more than 100,000 jobs through the first half of the year. June alone saw the creation of nearly 65,000 full-time jobs, offset by the loss of 71,000 part-time, leaving unemployment unchanged at 6.8 per cent. But total hours worked were up zzzzzzzz.