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Mr Trudeau has learned a lot on his overseas trips of these past few years apparently. One of the tricks he’s picked up is to swell your public sector to fend off economic humiliation versus a neighbor.

Spain did this successfully in the years before 2008 to not look weak compared to its same-sized neighbors France, UK and Germany who all had thriving economies. Problem was that the 2008-2009 financial crisis hit Spain particularly hard as it had to cut much more afterwards.

As to Canada, we can only guess that the liberal government of Mr Trudeau does not want to look weak compared to a steaming US economy in the weeks before NAFTA talks.

In February of this year, Canada added net 15,000 full time jobs, which were driven by 50,000 public sector jobs. So in reality, they lost 35,000 jobs.

This comes after a month of January where the Canadian economy shed 88,000 jobs. You can see how important it was for Mr Trudeau’s government not to have two successive months of job losses as three would start to look like contraction.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Canada Lost Over 39,000 Full-Time Jobs Last Month. <a href="https://t.co/vWzRdJ16xH">https://t.co/vWzRdJ16xH</a></p>— Spencer Fernando ���� (@SpencerFernando) <a href="https://twitter.com/SpencerFernando/status/972185262410235904?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 9, 2018</a></blockquote>

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Manulife Asset Management Economist Mr Frances Donald commented: “These jobs numbers fit quite well into the Bank of Canada’s cautiously optimistic Canadian narrative.”

“The Canadian job market, just like the broader economy, is decelerating somewhat, but it’s coming back down to earth in what we might consider a more-reasonable pace of gains with fewer distortions.”

If you read in between those lines, you understand that the next few months will be make or break for Canada. Looks like those steel tariffs might hack into Canadian industry if Mr Trudeau is not careful.

Source:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/top-business-stories/trumps-tariffs-may-yet-hurt-canadian-industry-if-foreign-steel-floods-ourmarket/article38269365/