Recession is over - barely but official

The end to the recession didn't come with a bang but with a whimper.

Nevertheless, the news Monday that the Canadian economy eked a slim gain in the last quarter made it official: The nine-month ordeal is over.

The data from Statistics Canada showed the economy grew at an annualrateof0.4percentinthethird quarter, far lower than the one-percent growth economists had forecast and the two per cent the Bank of Canada had called for.

Yet it marked the country's emergence, at least numerically, from a period in which the financial crisis threatened the world's banking system, stock markets plunged into an abyss, andhundreds ofthousandsof Canadians lost their jobs.

Economists welcomed the news, although they cautioned that the data on gross domestic product, or GDP, contained troubling signs.

"The Canadian economy is erratically grinding out of recession, led by broad-based gains in domestic spending," said BMO Capital Markets economist Douglas Porter.

The numbers were "not exactly a clanging endorsement of the 'end of recession' story . . . but they set the table for a much better fourth quarter."

It was the domestic economy that saved the day.

"Canada didn't have the credit problems that they had in the U.S. andelsewhere," saidDianaPetramala, an economist at TDEconomics.

"That allowed Canadian businesses and consumersto take advantage of low borrowing rates that other countries couldn't capitalize on," she said.

That availability of credit helped fuel a dramatic turnaround in the nationalhousingmarket, andshould help push the economy ahead as recent home buyers buy furniture and carry out home renovations, she said.

(prepared by John Morrissy/Vancouver Province)