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Stephen Poloz, the Bank of Canada governor, has been working hard to understand the post-crisis labour market. When the jobless rate plunged, some on Bay Street quickly called for interest-rate increases. Poloz resisted. He argued that the headline numbers masked ongoing weakness;depressed measures of youth participation and elevated levels of long-term unemploymentshowed that slack remained, he said.

Wages also were an important part of the story, given their correlation with inflation. Paycheques stagnated in 2015 as the collapse of oil prices interrupted Canada’s rebound from the Great Recession. The central bank cut interest rates twice, and the economy eventually got back on track. The central bank’s preferred salary gauge, anindex called wage-common, climbed to three per cent in the fourth quarter of 2017, the highest since 2011. But the momentum waned. The indicator decelerated to 2.8 per cent at the start of 2018, then dropped to 2.6 per cent and 2.3 per cent in the quarters that followed.

Three per cent is seen as a magic number for wage growth. It’s a pace that both keeps up with inflation and leaves workers with a little something extra. Canada got there, but couldn’t hold on. Andrew Scheer, the Opposition leader, appeared to be on to something with political messaging that emphasized that Canadians should be doing more than just getting by.

Scheer’s choice of rhetoric might have been telling us something about the economy.