Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Friday the country is in a mild recession and that Canada will come out of it strongly.
Flaherty delivered his upbeat message in London, England, to a meeting of the Canada-U.K. Chamber of Commerce.
"Relatively speaking, this is a mild economic recession," Flaherty said.
Canada's Finance Minister Jim Flaherty says the worst economic downturn since the Second World War is a "serious recession" and expects 2009 to continue to be a "difficult year," especially in the manufacturing and auto sectors. But he also says the government has "taken the necessary steps" to help mitigate the effects.
"Canada is not an island, so we're affected as a trading economy. There's significant unemployment, but interest rates are low, relatively speaking, so this is quite different from the recession we went through in the 1980s when the prime rate was in excess of 20 per cent," Mr. Jim Flaherty (Whitby-Oshawa, Ont.) told The Hill Times last week in a telephone interview. "This is a different situation now. But it is a serious recession and that's why we've taken the steps we've taken, quite dramatic steps, in the budget."
From mild to serious in 17 days. (Actually less since the interview was last week.)
And incidentally, while he insists the government has taken "the necessary steps," he's already backing off the claim that those steps will create 190,000 jobs by 2010. That claim is only, what, 3 months old?
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