Trudeau's Economic Legacy:
Canada's Lost Decade in Numbers

On the surface, Canada's economy grew at a respectable pace during the Trudeau years - averaging roughly 1.9% annual real GDP growth from 2016 to 2024. That's actually the second-best total GDP growth in the G7, behind only the United States. The economy expanded about 17% in total over the decade.

But here's where the story falls apart. When you adjust for population growth - which is the only way to measure whether individual Canadians are actually getting richer - the picture is devastating. Real GDP per capita grew by a pitiful 2.9% over the ENTIRE decade, according to the Fraser Institute. That works out to roughly 0.3% per year. For context, that's the worst per-capita GDP growth in the G7, and the worst in Canada since the Great Depression.

The reason for the discrepancy is simple: the population grew almost as fast as the economy. Population growth accounted for 85% of Canada's total GDP growth during the Trudeau era. The economy got bigger, but individual Canadians didn't get richer.

This is arguably the most damning chart in Trudeau's entire economic legacy. Between 2014 and 2024, Canada's real GDP per capita grew by a mere 1.1%. The United States, by comparison, grew by roughly 20%. Even Germany - the next-worst performing G7 country - managed about 5%.

The OECD has projected that Canada will rank dead last among all 38 OECD member nations for GDP per capita growth through 2060. Not just last in the G7 - last among all advanced economies on Earth. TD Economics called it a "standard-of-living emergency."

When Justin Trudeau ran for office in 2015, he promised "modest" deficits of no more than $10 billion per year and a return to balanced budgets by 2019. What actually happened was nine consecutive deficits - every single year he was in power - totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in new debt.

The federal debt doubled from $619 billion in 2015-16 to roughly $1.2 trillion by 2024. Gross federal debt went from $1.06 trillion to a projected $2.15 trillion. The debt-to-GDP ratio ballooned from 31.5% in 2015 to 42.2% by 2023.

While COVID-19 obviously played a role, the spending problem existed well before the pandemic. The Trudeau government recorded the six highest years of per-person spending (inflation-adjusted) in Canadian history between 2018 and 2023 - higher than during both World Wars, higher than during the Great Depression, higher than the 2008 financial crisis. By 2024-25, debt interest costs alone hit $53.7 billion, or $1,301 per Canadian - more than all GST revenue combined.

Canada's population grew from roughly 35.8 million in 2015 to 41.5 million by late 2024 - an increase of 5.7 million people, or about 16%. That's a staggering number for a decade, driven almost entirely by immigration. In 2023, Canada's population grew by 3.2% in a single year - a rate completely unprecedented among developed nations. For comparison, the average population growth rate of the other G7 countries in 2023 was less than 0.5%.

By 2024, Canada had over 3 million temporary residents - international students, temporary foreign workers, and others. The side-door immigration stream (temporary residents) had grown to be roughly double the front-door stream (permanent residents). When Trudeau finally announced cuts to immigration targets in late 2024, public sentiment had already turned sharply against the policy - 58% of Canadians told pollsters there was too much immigration, up from 14% in 2023.

The core problem was that infrastructure - housing, healthcare, transportation - simply couldn't keep pace with population growth of this magnitude.

Perhaps no single issue defines the Trudeau era more than the housing crisis. The average Canadian home price rose from approximately $443,000 in 2015 to $707,100 in 2024 - an increase of roughly 60%. At the peak of the frenzy in early 2022, the national average hit $817,000 before cooling off.

But the raw price increase only tells part of the story. The house price-to-income ratio - the key measure of affordability - went from about 10x income in 2015 to a peak of 16x income in 2022. Between 2015 and late 2023, house prices outgrew nominal disposable income by 39%. By 2023, the monthly single-family mortgage payment amounted to roughly 66% of a household's income, up from 46% in 2020.

Entire cities became effectively unaffordable. To qualify for an average-priced home, prospective buyers needed an annual income of $78,000 to $237,000 depending on the city. Toronto earned a spot as one of the markets globally at highest risk of a housing bubble. Canada's housing investment hit 25% of national wealth - double the U.S. share.

Inflation was relatively tame during the first five years of the Trudeau era, hovering between 1% and 2.3%. Then the pandemic hit, and the combination of massive government spending, supply chain disruptions, and a flood of newly printed money sent inflation soaring. It peaked at 6.8% in 2022 - a 40-year high - before gradually cooling to around 2.4% by late 2024.

Cumulatively, prices rose roughly 27% over the decade. That means a dollar in 2015 bought you only about 79 cents worth of goods by 2024.

Food costs were hit especially hard. The Bank of Canada reported that grocery prices rose roughly 22% since 2022 alone, while other consumer prices rose 13%. The average monthly grocery bill went from about $974 in 2019 to $1,227 in 2024. A family of four was spending over $16,000 per year on food by 2024. Ground beef hit $15 per kilogram. Coffee prices spiked 28.6% in a single year. Nearly half of all Canadians reported that rising prices were greatly impacting their ability to meet day-to-day expenses.

Nominal wages in Canada rose significantly during the Trudeau era. The average hourly wage went from roughly $24.50 in 2015 to $35.20 in 2024 - an increase of about 44% in nominal terms. That sounds impressive, until you adjust for inflation.

In real terms (inflation-adjusted), the average hourly wage was up only about 5% from 2019 to 2024, according to Statistics Canada. And much of that "gain" was a statistical illusion caused by the pandemic disproportionately eliminating lower-paying jobs, which pushed up the average. When those jobs returned, real wage growth essentially flatlined.

From 1981 to 2024, median real hourly wages grew by only 20% - total, over 43 years - with most of that growth occurring after 2003. Canadian workers have been running on a treadmill for decades, and the Trudeau era was no exception.

The Canadian dollar averaged about $0.782 USD in 2015. By 2024, the annual average had dropped to roughly $0.730 USD - a decline of about 7%. At its worst point in late 2024, the loonie dropped below $0.70 USD, levels not seen since the early 2000s.

A weaker currency makes imports more expensive - including food, consumer goods, and anything bought from the United States. Since Canada imports a huge share of its food (especially during winter months), the weaker dollar directly contributed to higher grocery prices. It also made Canadian assets cheaper for foreign buyers, adding fuel to the housing crisis.

The dollar's decline reflected deeper problems: weak productivity growth, ballooning government debt, interest rate differentials with the U.S., and declining investor confidence in Canada's economic trajectory.

One metric that tells a revealing story is the split between private-sector and government-sector employment growth. During the Trudeau era (2015-2024), private-sector employment grew by 13.4%, while government-sector employment exploded by 27.0%.

Compare that to the Chretien era - when private-sector employment grew 27.4% while government-sector employment grew only 4.7%. The ratio completely flipped. Under Trudeau, government hiring outpaced private-sector job creation by a factor of two.

The federal public service itself ballooned from 257,034 employees in 2015 to a record 357,247 by 2023 - an increase of nearly 39%. As a share of the total population, the federal bureaucracy grew from 0.72% to 0.90%.