FIRST READING: Immigration has been artificially juicing Canadian GDP the whole time

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa June 3, 2026. Photo by Photo by Blair Gable/Postmedia

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First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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When asked about Canada’s official slide into recession, Prime Minister Mark Carney attributed it in part to his government’s dial down of immigration.

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“We see some weakness, in part because of clear decisions by the government,” he told reporters on Tuesday, before noting his government’s lowered immigration targets.

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The comment reveals something about the Canadian economy that analysts and critics have been warning about for years.

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Namely, that Canada’s post-COVID economic growth has been predominantly based on packing unprecedented numbers of new consumers into the country.

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As such, when weighing the growth of the Canadian economy against the outsized growth of the Canadian population, the country has already been in a “per-capita recession” for much of the last four years.

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It’s a term that CIBC Deputy Chief Economist Benjamin Tal used in October, telling a conference in Ottawa that Canada was already in recession. “If it’s not a formal recession, it’s a per-capita recession,” he said.

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GDP is a measure of total economic activity. So while it can track whether a country is becoming richer and more productive, it can also increase simply if the number of consumers in an economy is getting larger.

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Every migrant to Canada consumes shelter, food and services in some capacity, all of which gets added to total GDP figures without necessarily signaling a growth in overall economic health.

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In 2024, for instance, Canadian GDP grew by 1.6 per cent. But population grew by 1.8 per cent, fuelled by record-breaking surges in everything from temporary foreign workers to asylum seekers to foreign students to permanent residents.

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The net result was a year in which per-capita GDP went down, which is generally an indicator that overall living standards are on the decline.

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“Our GDP per capita has been on the decline for two years,” Jasraj Singh Hallan, the Conservatives’ shadow finance minister, told the House of Commons in November 2024. He added, “in simple terms, Canadians are getting poorer.”

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The Bank of Canada would admit as much in 2025. After a year that saw GDP grow by 1.7 per cent, the central bank concluded in a monetary policy report that the growth in wealth was “essentially flat on a per-person basis.”

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The Fraser Institute has called this phenomenon Canada’s “ugly” growth experience.

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Across 2020 and 2024, the institute calculated in a 2025 report that Canada’s aggregate GDP growth was 1.5 per cent per year, working out to total growth of about six per cent over the four years.