John MacFarlane, Yahoo Finance »
“It’s actually a way that we see forward now, and because we’ve had this prod from all of the very aggressive language coming towards us, it does seem that now is a bit of a moment,” Deloitte chief economist Dawn Desjardins told Yahoo Finance Canada in an interview.
The Deloitte report, published Wednesday morning, projects significant impacts on labour, consumer spending, business investment, imports and exports, and monetary and fiscal policy as a result of the trade war. At the same time, it notes that Canada has thus far seen more favourable tariffs than most other countries.
“In an unexpected way, we might have a little bit of an advantage,” Desjardins said. “Because you didn’t feel that, certainly, at the beginning of the year. It did not feel like it was going to be Canada” that suffered less.
Deloitte currently projects a “modest downturn” in the second and third quarters of this year. It expects GDP growth of 1.2 per cent in 2025, down from around two per cent in its previous, pre-tariff outlook — but the report points out that deep uncertainty about nearly everything in the trade war makes a single projection less meaningful.
