Category
Economy
GDP, inflation, jobs, trade. The big economic indicators, charted with the actual data and the methodology Statistics Canada uses.
The economy in six numbers
Live headline indicators, straight from Statistics Canada.
Snapshot as of 18 July 2026. Each number links to its Statistics Canada source table on the full tracker.
Latest economy stories
Canada is the most single-customer-dependent oil exporter in the world
95.6 % of Canada's raw crude oil exports go to the United States. Angola and Brazil — the next-most-concentrated exporters — sit around 50 %. Every other major exporter sits below 35 %.
After 306 Million Dollars in Federal Funding, Bombardier Asks to Hire Record 40 Foreign Workers
The request coincides with 306.5 million dollars in federal funding for Bombardier's aerospace business, and lands during a technical recession, with manufacturing unemployment rising.
Every major Canadian airport lost US flights in 2026
The 52.8 percent cross-border collapse was mostly car trips. In the air the US pullback is milder, about 10 percent nationally, but it lands unevenly. Toronto and Vancouver carry the most US exposure. Edmonton and Winnipeg fell the hardest.
Ontario EI rolls surged 24 percent since 2024 — factories are not the reason
In the two years since January 2024, Employment Insurance beneficiaries in Ontario grew by nearly 36,000 to 185,010 — a 24 percent jump at nearly double the national rate. Manufacturing and utilities occupations, the ones cited most in tariff coverage, account for none of it.
Canada's best pension fund? We ranked all 8 — the benchmark winner isn't the famous one
After Ontario Teachers trailed its benchmark, we pulled the latest annual report of all eight of Canada's pension giants and built one standardized scorecard. Over a decade, only HOOPP clearly beats the benchmark it sets for itself — by 2 full percentage points a year. CPP and PSP earn the highest raw returns. And on the question that started this — private companies — almost no fund reliably beats its own private-equity benchmark once you stop looking at a single year.
Canada's road and water networks are aging back to 2005 levels
Canada's headline measure of infrastructure health has climbed for two decades. The data underneath tells a different story: the country's roads are back where they stood in 2005, and waterworks have fallen every year since 2014. The national average hides the decline of two networks people use daily.
Canadians are scared of AI. Their employers keep using more of it.
Two-thirds of Canadians want Ottawa to rein in artificial intelligence, even if it slows the technology down. Over the same stretch the share of businesses actually using AI has tripled, to about one in five. The fear and the reality have drifted apart, and the StatCan numbers on who is adopting, and why everyone else is not, tell a stranger story than the panic does.
CPP sold Nvidia all the way up — and it became its biggest stock anyway
Before the AI boom, the Canada Pension Plan held 120 million Nvidia shares. It spent five years selling three-quarters of them — through the launch of ChatGPT, through the greatest stock run of the decade — then bought back in near the top. The shares it sold would be worth more than fifteen billion dollars today.
Ontario Teachers got into SpaceX early. A plain index fund still beat them in 2025.
Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan bought into SpaceX in 2019, and the stake could be worth as much as 11.6 billion U.S. dollars if the company lists at its targeted valuation. Yet in 2025 the fund returned 6.7 percent — below its own 11.7 percent benchmark and less than half the S&P 500's 17.9 percent. Its private equity lost money for the first time in 16 years. A look at what the windfall hides, and how Canada's pension giants are quietly changing what they invest in.
Canada has an "entrepreneurial drought," small-business group tells MPs
Appearing before the House Finance Committee on the spring economic update, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business said more businesses are closing than opening across several sectors, for as long as 12 straight quarters. It warned that 55 percent of current owners would not recommend starting a business today, and pressed for a lower tax rate and a deduction threshold that has not moved since 2009.
As Dunkin' prepares for its Canadian relaunch via Foodtastic, public LMIA data shows the master franchisee hires foreign workers at nearly the same rate as Tim Hortons
Foodtastic, the Montreal company that just signed an exclusive deal to bring Dunkin' back to Canada with "hundreds of locations," has approved 109 Temporary Foreign Worker positions across its existing portfolio over the past two years. Normalized by workforce, that works out to roughly 5.7 per 1,000 employees — about 85 per cent of Tim Hortons' rate. Tim Hortons got every front page for promising to cut its TFW use. Foodtastic, with a similar per-worker rate, is opening hundreds of new stores under a "Dunkin' is back" headline.
Canada was the world's 4th-largest carmaker in 2000. It now ranks 14th.
In 2000 Canada built 2.96 million vehicles and sat fourth in the world. In 2025 it built 1.24 million and slipped to 14th, behind the Czech Republic and Turkey. Mexico now builds 3.3 times as many vehicles as Canada does.
Canada has lost 111,000 full-time jobs since January. Quebec is taking the worst of it.
April was the fourth straight monthly decline in full-time employment. Unemployment hit a six-month high. Wages still grew 4.5 percent year-over-year. The headline number of minus 18,000 hides what is happening underneath it.
Canada's EV market didn't slow — it was switched off
Honda is shelving its largest-ever North American EV investment, citing 'sluggish U.S. demand.' The Canadian story is sharper — ZEV market share fell from 18% to 9% in one quarter when both major rebates ended within weeks of each other.
52.8 % — Canadian trips to the US have collapsed since August 2024
4.17 M monthly trips at the peak → 1.97 M by Feb 2026. Fourteenth consecutive month of YoY decline. Overseas travel didn't move. The mechanism: January 2025 tariffs.