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Governments aren’t the only ones whose deficits are rising rapidly across Canada. The rising red ink at the federal level and in oil-dependent provinces like Alberta and continued large borrowing by Ontario are just one manifestation of a broader problem. The release of the fourth-quarter National Accounts, Tuesday, shows that almost all the major sectors of our economy are running deficits: households, governments, and external trade.

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Borrowing from Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper, I see Canada as a country dominated by ants (i.e. prudent, hard-working savers). Yet one would never know it judging from how certain high-profile statistics are bandied about.

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The one exception is firms, although their surpluses — once famously characterized as “dead money” by former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney — almost disappeared in the first half of 2015 under the avalanche of snowballing losses in the resource sector.