craigmcn

The Canadian economy, by most official measures, is in reasonable shape. Unemployment is low, inflation has come down from its 2022 peak, and the majority of Canadians are employed, housed and not in default on anything. If you described this situation to an economist, they would probably tell you things are more or less fine. If you described it to someone who just got home from buying groceries, you might get a different response.

What the headline numbers don’t capture is the squeeze that’s happened inside the budget. Housing costs in Canada have outpaced wage growth for years, and grocery prices, even as inflation moderates, remain substantially higher than they were three years ago. Those two categories together, shelter and food, don’t leave much margin. The margin is exactly where ordinary life used to happen: the dinner out to mark the end of a hard week, the weekend somewhere that isn’t home, the concert ticket, the thing you replace instead of repair. None of those are luxuries in any meaningful sense. They’re just what a fulfilling life used to cost.

The cruelty of the current moment is that the people most likely to tell you the economy is fine are also the people least likely to feel the margin disappearing. Employed and housed used to mean comfortable. It no longer reliably does. A household can meet every conventional marker of financial stability and still find that anything beyond the essentials requires a conversation and a spreadsheet. That’s a new condition, and it doesn’t have a clean name in the economic data, so it mostly goes unmeasured and therefore unaddressed.

What gets measured gets managed, as the saying goes, and Canada is managing its economy toward indicators that don’t include whether regular people can afford a regular life. The anger that shows up in polling, in political volatility and in the general ambient frustration of the last few years isn’t nostalgia or irrationality. It’s a reasonable response to a system that keeps telling you you’re doing fine while the evidence in your wallet suggests otherwise.