Canada underperformed during 2020 recession, reports think tank

Among 33 industrialized nations, Canada witnessed the second-highest growth in its overall debt relative to the size of the economy (GDP) from 2019 to 2021, trailing only Japan, according to a new report from the Fraser Institute, a free-floating, non-partisan think tank in Canada.

“Despite Canada’s comparatively high debt accumulation during the pandemic, which many argued would result in strong economic performance, we actually underperformed most of our peers,”  said Tegan Hill, economist at the Fraser Institute and co-author of The Accumulated Debt and Economic Performance of Industrialized Countries during COVID.

According to information from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the analysis determines that Canada experienced the second-highest increase in its gross debt as a percentage of the world economy from 2019 to 2021 out of 33 nations. The ratio of gross debt to GDP increased from 87.2% percentage points in 2019 to 112.1% in 2021, a rise of 24.9 percentage points.