Jack Mintz: Chrystia Freeland may be wishing she was Irish

financialpost.com:

When Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland delivers her fall economic statement on Monday she’ll need to spin a good story. It won’t be easy. The deficit for this fiscal year is expected to running much higher than the $40.1 billion she promised, maybe even over $60 billion, crashing through one of her fiscal “guardrails.”

No doubt she’ll pat herself on the back that the debt has risen less quickly than the gross domestic product. But that would be a hard guardrail to dent. It would take a truly whopping deficit — more than $120 billion — before debt rose faster than GDP. But that’s only because the debt is now so high, with all that has piled up since 2015, that extra debt has to be that much larger before the total can grow as fast as GDP.

With per capita GDP down almost four per cent from 2022 and the unemployment rate up almost two points to 6.8 per cent, Canada’s recent economic performance offers little for Freeland to brag about. The next couple of years may see better growth but we won’t catch the booming U.S., where per capita GDP is now 50 per cent higher than here. With oil prices softening and immigration slowing, it’s hard to see genuinely robust Canadian economic numbers in the next few years even if Donald Trump’s tariff threat comes to nothing.

Freeland would be much happier if she could deliver an Irish economic statement instead. Her new Irish counterpart, Jack Chambers, has no worries about slow growth or ballooning deficits. His “problem” is a surplus — a €24-billion surplus (C$34 billion) — and it’s mainly because corporate income tax receipts have been pouring in. They’ve more than doubled since 2019, from €10.8 billion then to €23.8 billion last year, and in the first 11 months of this year they’re up