 Monday, November 24, 2025 | | | Welcome to Mind Your Business ! Consider this your weekly guide to understanding what’s happening in the worlds of economics, business and finance. By Peter Armstrong
|  | GDP numbers this week will confirm whether Canada officially dodged a recession. (faithie/Shutterstock) | | | Over the past few months, a single question has loomed over the economic landscape: Is Canada slipping into a recession?
As the trade war bit deeper over the summer, the economy stalled. The unemployment rate climbed and economic growth repeatedly dipped into negative territory.
The truth is, Canada has been on the precipice of a recession for months now.
A recession is usually defined as two back-to-back quarters of negative growth. Put another way, if the economy has contracted over a period of six months, we call it a recession.
Over the second quarter (April, May and June), Canada's economy contracted 1.6 per cent.
July posted 0.3 per cent growth, which was better than expected. In August, those gains were reversed (which was much worse than expected).
On Friday of this week, we will get GDP numbers for September. That's the final month of the third quarter (July, August and September). | | |  | | | | | If the September numbers show the economy contracted, we will officially be in recession territory.
If the economy expanded, even a little, we will have probably avoided a recession.
When Statistics Canada released the August numbers, it provided a preliminary look ahead to what it thought was happening in September.
"Advance information indicates that real GDP increased 0.1 per cent in September. Increases in finance and insurance, mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction, and manufacturing were partially offset by decreases in wholesale trade and retail trade," wrote Statistics Canada.
The debate over the technical definition of a recession doesn't matter much to those who are caught up in it.
And yes, of course, the trade war has made things worse, but Canada's economy was struggling long before Donald Trump and his tariffs showed up on the scene.
The employment rate has fallen nearly two full percentage points since 2023.
How does that compare to previous downturns? |  | | | That chart comes via this excellent piece in The Hub by Trevor Tombe, a professor of economics at the University of Calgary.
"That’s a bigger decline than we saw in nearly every Canadian recession in recent decades—except for 1981, 1990, and during the COVID crisis," wrote Tombe.
He points out the unemployment rate has also ticked up nearly two full percentage points over the same period. Tombe says that works out to about half a million more unemployed Canadians.
The point of all this is that Friday's numbers are important and dodging a recession is better than slipping into one.
But the defining characteristic of the Canadian economy is weakness. And for most Canadians, there isn't all that much difference between 0.1 per cent growth in September and a 0.1 per cent contraction.
That's why so many people feel like the economy is already in a recession, whether it meets the technical definition or not.
What do you think?
Email me at peterarmstrong@cbc.ca
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forwarded to you. | | |  | | Canadian GDP numbers will be released on Friday. The release will determine whether the Canadian economy slipped into a recession this summer or not. | | | | | The latest jobs numbers come out on Thursday. The
Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours will look under the hood at the state of the labour market in September. | | | | | | Canada's balance of international payments will be released on Thursday. The numbers will highlight the ongoing impact of the trade war. | | | | | Three things to read, watch and listen to this week | | |  | Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered blockbuster earnings results last week. (Win McNamee/Getty Images) | | | 1. NVIDIA's earnings and market volatilty | | | Don't worry everyone, NVIDIA says there isn't a bubble.
But that might be the kind of thing you'd expect from a company that has seen its stock rise 23,000 per cent in the last 10 years.
Jon Erlichman, founder of the Ticker Tape YouTube channel (and formerly a longstanding host and business journalist on BNN and CTV), has a series of tweets about the mind-boggling numbers behind NVIDIA's rise.
The company made $100 million US in profit 20 years ago. Today, he says, NVIDIA makes $100 million every seven hours.
The stock has been one of a handful driving markets to record highs.
And the chip maker has become a sort of avatar for the AI industry as a whole.
Financial markets were rather excited about last week's earnings. Could the company possibly keep up with the bonkers momentum? Could AI's rise possibly keep up its breakneck pace?
And what would happen if NVIDIA fell short of expectations? What if the company announced it was scaling back on chip production?
Well, I guess we'll never know.
The earnings report didn't meet expectations — it exceeded them.
"There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors during Wednesday’s earnings call. "From our vantage point, we see something very different."
The blockbuster earnings won't quell talk of a bubble. Investors were worried the AI spending spree couldn't possibly be sustained. They're still worried.
But in this Bloomberg interview, Huang had some really interesting answers to those questions, especially around the company's ambitions to sell in China.
Check out Huang's interview with Bloomberg here. | | | 2. Roblox damage control | | | If you have kids, you have probably heard about Roblox. It's one of the most popular websites used by young people.
Many major websites require (ostensibly, at least) users to be at least 13 years old to join. Roblox has no such limit.
The New York Times says 40 per cent of Roblox users are under 13.
The company recently announced it will step up its age verification system for users who want to message other players so kids, teens and adults will only be able to message people around their own age.
That decision came in the wake of criticism and as many as 20 lawsuits over child safety on the platform.
Amid all that, the CEO of Roblox went on the New York Times podcast Hard Fork.
And, well, it got tense.
The hosts repeatedly asked David Baszucki how the company can do more to ensure the safety of its users. Baszucki got increasingly frustrated.
"You don’t think you have a problem with predators on the platform?" asked host Casey Newton.
Baszucki responded by highlighting several key decisions the company has made.
"I think we’re doing an incredible job at innovating relative to the number of people on our platform and the hours, in really leaning into the future of how this is going to work," he said.
But they kept asking. Baszucki at one point turned the tables on them: if the hosts were in charge of user safety, would they use more AI to police posting? They agreed.
"I’m so glad you guys are aligned with the way we run Roblox. High-five," he said.
The interview is fascinating. It delves into issues around kids and websites and how best to ensure safety.
But there's a deeper question here about how executives can and should try to answer for those issues.
Check out the Hard Fork interview with the CEO of Roblox here. | | | 3. Is Canada winning the travel trade war? | | | My colleague Sophia Harris writes the best stories. Every time you see her byline, just click on the story — it's sure to be a banger. This one is a perfect example. Harris digs into the numbers around the travel sectors in both Canada and the U.S. to see the impact of the trade war. "Overall, between February and October, the number of return trips by Canadians to the U.S. declined by 21 per cent for air travel and by a staggering 33.5 per cent for land travel, according to Statistics Canada data provided to CBC News," she wrote. More to the point, she found the U.S. Travel Association's forecast for 2025 models in a loss of $5.7 billion US. Harris's reporting found the cause of that drop-off is clear. “We're getting decimated, our border communities in particular, by the lack of Canadian tourism,” said Laurie Trautman, director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash. Not surprisingly, America's loss is Canada's gain. "Destination Canada, the country’s tourism organization, estimates year-over-year total tourism revenue for the lucrative summer season of May to August increased by an unprecedented $3.3 billion (six per cent)," wrote Harris. I don't want to steal all the best details. Just do yourself a favour and go read the article. | | | How the economy looks beyond Bay Street | | | Inflation softens its blow | | | Last week, we were looking ahead to the latest inflation numbers.
The numbers showed the pace of inflation slowed to 2.2 per cent. That's a bit higher than the expectation of 2.1 per cent.
The deceleration came largely as a result of dropping gasoline prices and the fact that grocery costs climbed more slowly than they had in the previous month.
Inflation was the most important thing on the economic landscape not that long ago.
It is indisputably better when inflation is ticking along at the rate most experts expected it to. | | |  | That's not to say the CPI report isn't important. Of course it is. And at least part of the reason why is that the Bank of Canada is watching closely.
BMO's chief economist Douglas Porter says these numbers merely confirm what most were expecting from the central bank.
"This report is just another reason to believe the bank is moving to the sidelines in December," wrote Porter in a research note on Monday.
He means that the Bank of Canada will likely leave rates unchanged next month.
What do you think?
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