Not too hot, not too cold: Canada's economy offers Goldilocks outlook amid global chaos | CBC News

Amidst a fireworks display of breaking stories that include warnings of a new and potentially worse COVID-19 variant of concern, Friday's stock market tumble, worrying inflation updates and a new round of supply chain problems caused by B.C.'s flooding, data out this week on the Canadian economy is expected to be reassuringly bland.

Of course, there remains plenty to learn about the latest coronavirus variant and its impact on the Canadian economy, but a new stream of business news out this week — including the country's growth rate, unemployment figures and the state of Canada's banks — is expected to be reassuring.

While Canadian inflation hovering near five per cent remains a worry, new data for gross domestic product, out later this morning, is not expected to show the kind of economic growth that would set inflation soaring.

When Statistics Canada released its data on Tuesday morning, it was not so ho-hum as had been predicted — with an annualized growth rate of 5.4 per cent.

Lower down the financial food chain, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business has released a moderately optimistic outlook in its monthly Business Barometer. .

Small business owners are a bit like Canadian farmers, who will never admit to things being absolutely good; so a CFIB release that says, "Overall, small business optimism is on an upswing," sounds positively buoyant. .

"Price increase plans over the next 12 months reached 4.3 per cent in November, while wage plans reached 3.1 per cent, a 0.6 percentage point increase since last month and the highest level recorded since CFIB started publishing its monthly Business Barometer in 2009," said the CFIB summary of its report.

But in a very different context, that is what the country's top central banker has said he would like to see in economic and jobs growth, too.

They estimate that the economy will crank out between 30,000 and 40,000 jobs, ticking the unemployment rate down another point to 6.6 per cent.

As in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, that kind of unemployment growth is not too hot and not too cold — it's just right for an economy worried about inflation.