Fact Check: Joe Oliver can’t rewrite history

September 23, 2015

TORONTO – Briefly out of hiding, Joe Oliver is denying the truth about Harper’s 2015 recession.

“We don’t believe that the economy was in fact in a recession,” Oliver said in a media interview (The Associated Press, September 23, 2015).

Unfortunately for Mr. Oliver, the Canadian economy meets his own definition of a recession – in the budget bill under his own name – which was introduced in Parliament just this year.

That bill defines a recession as “a period of at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth in real gross domestic product for Canada, as reported by Statistics Canada”. 

Earlier this month, Statistics Canada reported two consecutive quarters of negative growth this year: “Real gross domestic product (GDP) declined 0.1% in the second quarter, following a 0.2% decrease in the first quarter”.  

As the former US Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts. ”