Article content continued

And Canada’s Q3 growth performance did not rely on government, inventories or a savings rate drawdown. In other words, it was clean as a whistle.

Things may be far from perfect, but most of Europe, parts of Asia and pretty well all of South America would gladly trade in their eye teeth for this sort of macroeconomic performance.

The Bank of Canada — as well as the beleaguered loonie — should be rather satisfied that net exports contributed nearly a full point or one-third of Q3’s headline growth performance. To little fanfare, net exports have actually added to GDP growth in all but one of the past eight quarters.

The current account deficit has been sliced to a six-year low and is now a totally manageable 1.7% of GDP (from a peak of around 5% four years ago).

And tack on the impressive pickup in manufacturing activity from shipments to exports to factory payrolls.

The loonie has done a ton of heavy lifting here.

Further, looking at the momentum into Q4, it looks like real GDP growth in Canada is going to top a 2.5% annual rate at a time when many forecasters are taking their U.S. forecasts to 2% or lower.

This is probably not being factored into a Canadian dollar that is already priced for sub-US$70 oil and is mistakenly viewed in many circles as a petro-currency (energy accounts for barely more than 5% of GDP, so, if I’m not mistaken, there’s another 95% to take into consideration).

This is yet another case of the narrative not exactly being consistent with the facts.