Canada’s economy appears to have shifted from grim to a glimmer to dim.

It may be worse than that, actually, based on comments from two economists who say the measure of real gross domestic income may need to be a factor along with GDP.

As The Globe and Mail’s David Parkinson documents, Canada’s economy rebounded from a first-half contraction to a third-quarter rebound of 2.3 per cent annualized. But, he writes, economists fear for the current fourth quarter and into next year.

Those concerns among economists are often based on gross domestic product, the general measure in such things.

But David Madani of Capital Economics and Ted Carmichael, an economist who now sits on the C.D. Howe Institute’s business cycle committee, suggest GDI, an economic measure based on income, may paint a fuller picture.

That picture may also be uglier.

“The rebound in third-quarter real GDP has prompted some commentators to conclude that Canada’s recession is officially over,” Mr. Madani said in a recent report.

“But the real GDI measure, which incorporates important terms of trade effects on real income earned from production, reveals a different story entirely,” he added.

“The recent contractions in real GDI, stagnation in final domestic demand and high business inventories are all early symptoms of recession. The recent weakness in employment and the rebound in the unemployment rate are also pretty clear signals.”

By that, he was referring to the rise in the jobless rate to 7.1 per cent.

Mr. Madani, whose group admits it is bearish on Canada, said the third-quarter bounce in GDP was “largely a head fake” because the underlying GDI trend was “overwhelmingly negative.”

GDP, for example, contracted by 0.2 per cent in the first quarter and 0.1 per cent in the second, not annualized, while GDI fell by 1.3 per cent and 0.1 per cent. GDP picked up in the third quarter, by 0.6 per cent, and GDI slipped 0.1 per cent.

Many economists believe Canada isn’t in a recession. For that matter, they don’t think the first-half contraction was a full-on recession because it didn’t bear many of the hallmarks.

Mr. Carmichael, who has just joined the C.D. Howe group that determines recessions, looked at the cumulative drops in real GDI in the last two slumps, which outpaced the contractions in real GDP.

“This is because the price of commodities produced in Canada fell quite sharply and the terms of trade weakened significantly,” Mr. Carmichael wrote in his blog.

“In the most recent period, real GDP fell only modestly, by just a cumulative 0.24 per cent over the first and second quarters of 2015, but real GDI fell for the three consecutive quarters to [the third quarter] and by a much larger 1.5 per cent,” he added.

“Since the terms of trade are continuing to decline in [the fourth quarter], this story is still unfolding and it is possible that the downturn in real GDI could deepen further.”

Mr. Carmichael believes that early 2015 likely did mark the onset of a recession, and a more severe one than the GDP readings suggested.

“However, I do not believe that a definitive conclusion can yet be reached on dating the beginning and the end of the recession,” he said.