On seeing the news that a new Ikea store was opening in Ottawa, Canada, you might have been forgiven for assuming it would create about as much excitement as any other worthwhile Canadian initiative. You would be wrong, apparently. Because the opening was an event sporting thundersticks, chanting, overnight camping and a speech by the mayor. In this time of global deficit reduction and austerity, in the face of European financial collapse, the newest, the biggest Ikea in Canada opened last week to all of these things in the name of the economy, progress, and growth.

But behind all the embarrassing parochial fanfare sits a system on the edge of collapse – the dead shell of consumer culture laid bare by years of panicked markets and burst bubbles – giving the entire event the pall of a woebegone celebration for the newest architectural tomb to an ideal under attack from the inside, rotting and hollow, and on the verge of dismantling itself. If only we knew it.

"I'm here to have fun and to support Ikea for coming into the community and boosting the economy," a young mum told the Ottawa Citizen after emerging from the mammoth new 427,000sq ft blue cube sitting just off the highway – another looming suburban eyesore, dwarfing its former location along with the chain restaurants and bookstores dotted nearby around a parking lot. Only about a third of the expected crowd of 13,000 shoppers showed up last Wednesday, leaving many of those spots empty.

The idea that the economy is in need of a boost is as familiar here as anywhere, only with a twist, as Canada's government has worked hard to convince everyone it's already happened. There's even a catchphrase with a nice big number: "600,000 net new jobs" since 2009, they say again and again – a consistent, action-oriented marketing slogan for future policy and government chest-pounding, rather than for the economy itself. A new branding exercise kicked off a day after Ikea opened, when the federal transport minister declared his colleague down the front bench to be "the greatest finance minister in the world". Still the same guy, only somehow better.

But here, too, there's trouble. Canada's household debt is on the rise, bumping up again in the second quarter of 2011, with household credit market debt now 149% of disposable income – the kind of levels that catch the attention of the International Monetary Fund. And only weeks before Christmas, the consumer confidence index has stumbled. Only a quarter of Canadians now believe they'll be better off this time next year.

Yet, we press on, forced to reconcile the two solitudes of austerity and growth, with the former acting as an add-on to the latter, rather than replacing it. Nothing can. Standing outside a big blue box store in the early Canadian December chill, there seems to be no other choice ahead for us adult consumers. We have to cut back, but simultaneously keep buying in, even as we realise more of the same is not better. It's defective logic, but there's nothing else on offer. Just trust in the slogans.

As the celebrations at Ikea went on, Twitter did what it usually does best: it collectively disdained the entire thing. One Maclean's magazine columnist went so far as to suggest that of the four rites of passage in life, the third (after puberty and marriage) was "realising everything you bought from Ikea is actually shit". The fourth, he wrote, is death.