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I couldn’t stop laughing over the weekend when I read the press headlines and Bay Street economists marvelling about those surreal job numbers in Canada for August. Think of what a gain of 80,000-plus jobs means if you believe it — it’s akin to an 800,000 surge in U.S. employment.

The Statistics Canada data were so not-to-be-believed. Accounting for all those Quebec jobs and part-time positions in Ontario, there was no employment growth in other areas of the country. Yet the Canadian dollar has rallied hard on this report and on the overconfidence the Bank of Canada is now demonstrating.

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Overconfidence about what, exactly?

Best to put the cork back in the champagne bottle for the time being

The 0.7 per cent decline in real final domestic demand in the second quarter? That’s the third decline in the past four quarters. By the way, real final sales in Canada would have contracted by more than a two-per-cent annual rate in Q2 absent the dead-cat bounce in the depressed energy sector, all that activity at the local bar during the Raptors amazing road to victory and, well, how can we forget this (maybe by taking in too much of it), the 74-per-cent annualized surge in the cannabis sector. No wonder productivity growth in Canada has slowed to a crawl … though pizza parlours and Pink Floyd albums have emerged into a full-blown bull market.