GUNTER: Job stats simply a mirage in Canadian growth

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The April job numbers, released this week by Statistics Canada, contained a pleasant surprise: 90,000 jobs created, when only 20,000 new jobs were expected.

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But the stats also contained an inconvenient truth. Canada’s economy has passed a dangerous tipping point – two in fact.

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Much of our employment growth has been in the public sector. And even at 90,000 new jobs some months, the economy is not growing fast enough to accommodate all the immigrants the Liberals are admitting.

Liberal spending and policies are nosediving the Canadian economy.

In the past year, the public sector (federal, provincial and municipal) has added 208,000 new jobs versus just 190,000 in the private sector.

In recent decades, private sector employment has usually been four or even five times total public sector employment, 75/25 or even 80/20.

It is crucial to maintain that ratio because public-sector employment is not self-sustaining. It’s funded by the taxes generated from private-sector employment and sales. Therefore, our economy cannot sustain itself if the public sector is growing faster than the sector it is dependent on.

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The famous Austrian-American management theorist, Peter Drucker, once wrote that an economy cannot survive with each of us selling insurance to one another. He meant even a robust service sector isn’t enough to sustain an economy. Producing industries, such as energy, agriculture, mining and manufacturing create the tangible products that add wealth that can be taxed to fund government, schools, hospitals, infrastructure and social services.

So, if even the service sector is insufficient to prop up the economy, imagine how inadequate the public sector is. Yet that is what the Liberals are relying on with their massive spending, while at the same time doing their level best to suppress producing industries.

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Canada’s statistical growth is a mirage, if it comes from the tax-funded and debt-funded public sector.

Even deeper in last month’s employment stats can be found another disturbing number. In April, Canada lost 11,000 jobs in construction, nearly 1% of the national total.

First, construction is another one of those producing sectors that the economy relies on. If it’s shrinking, the foundations of the economy are shrinking. And it’s shrinking because high interest rates are depressing housing sales. And high interest rates are largely the result of the inflation caused by Liberal overspending.

But second, and more importantly, with the Liberals adding as many as 1.4 million temporary, permanent and student newcomers a year, the country needs more construction, not less. Yet most mortgagers and the CMHC expect a decline in new housing starts in 2024, which will keep housing unaffordable.

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Despite the billions in the recent Liberal budget, there will simply not be enough jobs to absorb all the newcomers nor enough housing built to lower the price of home buying or renting.

To be sure, 90,000 new jobs is not to be sneezed at. It beats new-job numbers for the past year, but economists estimate that most months Canada will need to produce at least 50,000 new jobs to accommodate immigration levels – and most months we don’t even come close.

This overabundance of immigrants is not only driving up housing prices and keeping unemployment numbers high, it’s also reducing per capita income, one of the key indicators of national living standards.

All of these Liberal economic failures combined mean that in just the nine years they have been in charge, the cost of rent and mortgages has doubled. The national debt and debt-servicing costs have doubled. And as much as $300 billion in investment in producing industries has been lost.

So much money has been taken out of the producing sectors that, under the Liberals, Canada has been come the biggest “breakdown nation” in the developed world.

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