An oil refinery in Alberta. Most of of the damage in 2015 was taken by oil producers in Alberta, while lower energy prices were a benefit to consumers and manufacturers in Ontario and Quebec. Canada’s economy won what’s likely a final verdict on the country’s 2015 downturn: It was bad, but it wasn’t a recession. The C.D. Howe Institute’s nonpartisan Business Cycle Council, a group of economists acting as an arbiter of booms and busts, made a close decision Friday to affirm the damage was still too narrow to label a recession. The review was undertaken to account for Statistics Canada data revisions last month that showed the impact of the oil-price collapse that year was larger than previously estimated. The council stuck to its initial assessment because the downturn — which included two consecutive quarterly contractions in output — wasn’t broad enough and the economy continued to add jobs. “It was an extremely close vote in the end,” Jeremy Kronick, associate director for research at C.D. Howe, said by phone from Toronto. With the narrow contraction and positive employment, the group “found it hard to call this a recession.” The R-word was widely bandied about during the 2015 […]
