Since oil crashed in 2014, the Canadian economy has been reeling. Yet that wasn’t the start of Canada’s problems, long before oil fell, there were signs everywhere of contraction. Empty storefronts, rising office vacancy rates, prime retail space sitting empty, and canceled LNG projects due to the price of natural gas falling.

In a post 2008 world, governments all over the world have resorted to getting creative with their statistics reporting, in hopes of convincing the public that the economy is doing well. Their belief is that if people are convinced the economy is doing well, they’ll go out and spend and invest, making for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Politicians are taught early on that leading is a confidence game, if the public believes and has confidence in a suggestion, they’ll make it real by their actions.

Sometimes, if the problem is not too serious, this works well, and no one is the wiser for it. However, when the problem is big, like it is today, this approach only makes the problem worse, but it buys politicians time. What do they do with that time? Not much, they’re politicians, they serve their own interests ahead of any and all other interests.

Canada now faces such a problem, as do many countries, like the US. The economy is clearly falling into recession and it’s getting obvious to even the average person who isn’t paying attention. Government employment stats were becoming politically unbearable for the Canadian government, until recently, when suddenly there was an absolute boom in Canadians starting their own businesses. In a country with roughly 30 million people, and around 17 million of them working at jobs, the Canadian government reported that in one month, 40,000 Canadians started their own business.

To put that in context, if that happened every month, here would be almost 5 million new businesses within a year, in a country with only 30 million or so people. This stat is beyond fraudulent, it’s laughable, and it’s being questioned, by Huffington Post no less. Since that stat was released, the new businesses just keep on stacking up, into the tens of thousands per month apparently. Pretty soon, everybody in Canada will be self-employed.

People in cities across Canada, from Vancouver to Toronto, are getting mixed signals and it’s confusing to them. Being told by your government that the economy is doing better and better, while seeing businesses close left and right creates confusion among the people. Being that most people trust their leaders, they believe them and make bad decisions as a result, like opening a new business on the belief that the economy is doing well. Politicians then tout how great things are because people are opening new businesses, but in the end, the business fails and the owner loses all the money he invested.

Politicians don’t care about this though, as it helps them keep the game going a little longer and stay in power. In the end, it only makes the consequences far worse, which ironically has taken us here in the first place. Had our leaders just admitted how bad things were in 2009 and let the poison work its way out of the system painfully, we wouldn’t be in this position, we would have had a real recovery and would be enjoying prosperity by now.

Since the mainstream media is corporately controlled, they’ll never write about these things, and neither will many bloggers either. In Vancouver there are no shortage of blogs, but none care to write about these things. Vancouver blogs talk about entertainment and food, while Canadians are falling off the economic cliff one by one. However, my Vancouver blog covers these topics and more.