Canada’s international trade fell in August, but is hard to make sales when you don’t have inventory.
International trade is exports (or revenue or money) coming in compared to imports (or money going out). We still sell more to the world than we buy from them but the spread between those two numbers was smaller in August.
One of the reasons for the narrowing is grain exports.
Statistics Canada, which tracks this stuff, still works on the old Wheat Board crop year which ended in July. It says last year’s smaller crop — which was hit by drought — meant Canadian farmers were carrying significantly reduced inventories in their bins and that impacted our ability to sell. We didn’t have product to ship.
But they are more optimistic about the coming months as a much-improved harvest is coming to close.
We also saw lower revenues for energy exports, principally because the price of oil was dropping through the summer, but we can probably expect to see some strength in this metric going forward as the Canadian dollar has been dropping for the past month.
