Canadian GDP, NFP Recovers

Canadian GDP and nonfarm payrolls signal a robust recovery as production-side data trends upward. ScotiaBank nowcasts Q2 growth at 2.3%, but the Business Data Lab’s 5.04% projection suggests a massive beat versus consensus.

Here’re quarterly and monthly GDP, normalized to October 2025:

Figure 1: Canadian real GDP (blue bars), monthly GDP (black line), both in logs 2025M10=0. Source: StatCan, and author’s calculations.

The two series diverge as the quarterly series are based on expenditure side tabulations, while monthly relies on production side data.

Figure 2: Monthly GDP (green), employment (blue), nonfarm payroll employment (red), employment +15yr (blue), all in logs 2025M10=0. Source: StatCan and author’s calculations.

Compare against the view in this post.

ScotiaBank‘s nowcast for Q2 is +2.3% q/q SAAR, while the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s Business Data Lab nowcast is +5.04% (!), way above Bloomberg consensus.

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