Canada's GDP Revised $40 Billion Higher Over Three Years, Boosting Debt Ratio and Productivity Outlook - BMO

06:05 AM EST, 11/07/2025 (MT Newswires) -- Bank of Montreal (BMO) said it normally wouldn't make a big deal about the annual estimate of real gross domestic product growth by province in Canada, which was released on Thursday for 2024.

However, for the second year in a row, Statistics Canada has significantly revised up its estimates of the overall GDP growth for the previous three years -- and that is first signalled in these provincial accounts, noted the bank.

To quickly summarize, national growth has been bumped up to 2.0% for 2024 from 1.6%, also to 2.0% for 2023 versus 1.5% and 4.7% for 2022 from 4.2%.

It may not seem like a big deal, but the combined three-year upgrade is 1.4 percentage points -- if there's no change in the deflator, that means the level of GDP is more than $40 billion higher than first estimated for 2024, stated BMO.

This follows a like-sized upward revision last year for 2021-23.

According to the bank, there are a few implications: a) the debt/GDP ratio will already look better than in Tuesday's budget (call it half a point lower), and b) the recent woeful productivity looks less woeful.

After all, productivity is output per hour worked, and there is no change in the hours worked part of the equation. It now looks like productivity managed to rise by nearly 2% from end-2019 (just before the pandemic) to end-2024, or about 0.4% per year, added BMO.

Not great, but better than earlier estimates of an outright decline, it pointed out.

MT Newswires does not provide investment advice. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.