There’s a Bit of Consensus Building on Sask’s Growth Outlook

We’ve been getting some updated provincial forecasts from the economists working at the major banks in this country. And there is a growing consensus on how Saskatchewan will perform in 2020. We should look for the economy to shrink by 6.2 percent this year.

Like the rest of the country, the forecasts we were seeing earlier in the year have been tossed out the window by the COVID lockdown. Jobs were lost, businesses closed up for months or, at the very least, hampered by the pandemic which triggered an across-the-board pullback in overall activity.

The latest to add its voice to the story is BMO Bank of Montreal. It too has pegged our decline at 6.2 percent. Where the banks differ is on how they think we’ll do in the bounce-back next year. BMO is setting their target at 5.3 percent growth. So we should recapture most of our lost ground and end up less than a percentage point behind if you aggregate the two years.

They see housing starts holding their own this year and the unemployment rate will decrease in the next five months.