There’s a lot of “Lost Decade” talk which is primarily supported by a chart showing GDP per capita which looks bad for Canada compared to other countries. But Canada’s GDP growth has been second in the G-7 to only the U.S. So why does that chart look so bad?

https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/april-2025/numerator-denominator/
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/april-2025/canada-alabama/

Per capita GDP has a numerator (GDP) and a denominator (population). Canada’s numerator has not performed badly by international standards. Real GDP growth over the past decade averaged close to two per cent per year, despite a shallow recession in 2015 and a bigger downturn during the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s the second fastest among G7 economies, behind only the U.S.

It’s the denominator, therefore, that explains Canada’s seemingly poor performance by this measure. GDP has grown but not as fast as the population. Indeed, in recent years, Canada has had its fastest population growth since the 1950s. The population grew three per cent in each of 2023 and 2024, almost entirely due to immigrants – two thirds of whom were non-permanent arrivals (on temporary work or student visas).

A question not answered in that article: Will the GDP charts suddenly start looking really good when the visas for large pool of temporary immigrants expire?