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Welcome everyone, today, April 15th, 2025 Economic impact videos. We've been reaching out to you for the past five years. Today's a special day, marks our five-year anniversary. We started these in April of 2020, just at the beginning of the pandemic and today we're in the middle of a tariff war. It's important. We are a financial institution. We reach out close to 8000 of our clients on a monthly basis. We have a responsibility. We need to share our opinions, our views on the economy. Today are unprecedented times. We are facing an American administration that is trying to change the world, which brings all sorts of challenges and concerns over the world. So, these are a way for us to reach out to you to tell you what we're seeing, our opinions. So, we're going to keep doing these. But today's a special day, five-year anniversary. And I'm going to pass the mic to Denis Girouard, who's been doing this for the past couple of years, and our Chief Economist, Stéfane Marion.

Thank you, Laurent. So Stéfane, where are we on those tariffs now?

And by the way, I need to thank Laurent too, you know, remind us that we're five years older after all of this. It's action-packed Denis, just like it was five years ago for different reasons. So, tariff structure on its way up, way up, way, way, way up. So.

They keep moving though.

They move all the time. It moves all the time. So, we went from 2 to 5 to 10 to 36 to 32. Now we're at 26 as of April 15th. If you want me to give you some historical perspective on this, you have to go back to 1901 to see 26% effective tariffs on U.S. imports.

Well, with those tariffs, there's an impact on an inflation expectation.

Oh the U.S. consumer is so much bigger than it was in 1901. So therefore 2/3 of the economy, tariff structure 26%, while consumers are concerned, and it clearly shows in the numbers, inflation expectations. It doesn't mean it will be realized, Denis, but consumers are potentially fearing the worst inflation since the 1980's, 6.7%.

Yeah. And because of that, the consumer sentiment is way, way low.

There's one thing you can do to really make consumers feel mad is it's inflation. We've seen it during the pandemic, right? Case and point. We have consumer sentiment right now as low as it was during the pandemic. Again, this inflation thing really is annoying to consumers. So that does not necessarily bode well for the US economy in the months ahead.

Consumers are not happy, but also the equity market.

Well, yeah, if you're, if you're going to hit 2/3 of U.S. economy, you're going to hit financial markets, and U.S. equities are being hit big time. The S&P 500 went as low as 19%, so we did not enter a bear market territory, which would mean reaching- Pardon me?

-20%?

Yeah -20%. So we went to -19%, we're at -12%.

Technically, we're not there.

We're not there, but we're still, you know, in correction territory in a sense. We're still below -10%. Denis, surprisingly, people have been asking, you know, how's the Canadian stock market going to behave? We had lower valuation to start off with. So, we've been hit less hard than other places. And right now we're down 8%. So, some relative resilience if you want. Everyone's down, but some countries are down less than others.

Yeah. At the same time, the U.S. dollar also is getting hammered.

Well, that's part of the reason that Canadian sector is more resilient. People are buying into Canadian assets. We can speak to that in the next few minutes, but clearly the U.S. dollar is not very popular right now. It's not popular within central banks. It's not popular with foreign, foreign pension funds. So, there's been a shunning of the U.S. dollar. And this is very unusual. Historically, when the stock market goes down, U.S. dollar should be going up, not down. This is really a change in correlation that reflects the uncertainty created by the tariff war.

Yeah, we have the stock market being quite volatile, but also the bond market, but also the spread on the corporate credit. It's widening quite a lot in that period of time.

Yeah. So, people are shunning the U.S. dollar. They're not very happy about U.S. treasuries. But one thing they don't like right now is the corporate debt market, which is very important to, as a source of liquidity, for U.S. corporations. So right now, corporate spreads 148 basis points. Right now it's way up 150 basis points up since the start of the year. Denis that's a big deal because if you're a high-yield corporation right now, your financing costs, your effective yield. If you're going to issue bonds, you got to pay 8%.

That's a lot. OK, there's a lot of people talking about stagflation. Are we going in a recession right now?

Slow down? Definitely. So much so that we have brought back to life our Recession Risk Monthly Monitor, which is available on the website for people interested. I'll spare you the details of all of these numbers. Suffice is to say, there's a lot of yellow in here, some red. If you put it all together, odds of a recession right now is 40%. Not the baseline scenario, but clearly there are some concerns that, in the months ahead, if you don't reduce tariffs, while I think these probabilities are likely to increase. So let's be careful right now. Financial markets rebound, equity rebounds, a lot of volatility, but these odds are likely to continue to rise unless Washington decides to lower tariffs. Not the case right now on a substantial level.

And there's maybe a pleasant surprise and all those news, Canadian dollar, which is bizarrely up.

So historically, if I get these probabilities to rise, you don't want to own the Canadian dollar. But, a lot of things are different this time around and Canadian dollar is actually behaving quite well, 5%. Our model says you should be 5 to 10% cheaper than what we are right now. But there seems to be some interest in the Canadian dollar or Canadian dollar assets.

Yeah. And what's really the effective rate, you know, on those tariffs in Canada? Because, you know, we have that that agreement between Mexico, United States and us, which is supposed to be at 20 something percent. And but we're all mixed up here, OK, because it's tough to follow and understand where we are.

So, there's a lot of confusion. So people are buying Canadian dollar assets because foreign investors believe that we're less impacted. Well, less impacted negatively versus other countries. So let me illustrate this and, and the confusion to try to help with the confusion. If we had no free trade agreements with the Americans, given what they have in place, we would be facing an effective tariff rate of 24%. But we do have a free trade agreement called USMCA and a lot of Canadian corporations are USMCA compliant. All the energy producers are now USMCA compliant. Put it all together right now Denis, so the effective tariff rate on Canada is 5.7%. The confusion out there is to say, well, everyone is a minimum 10%. No, not the case. If you are USMCA compliant, particularly if you're an energy producer, 5.7%. Now if more firms become, Canadian corporations become USMCA compliant, between now and the year end, we could be at 4.2% or even lower if Washington reduces tariffs on aluminum software lumber. So right now, 5.7%, you can understand that foreign players or foreign investors saying, well, I'm going to invest in the place where the tariff structure is less punitive. We are part of that group.

Then don't show that to President Trump because he wants everybody at 10%.

I think he's aware of that because he's calling the exception that he knows that if taxing Canadian energy would just make inflation expectations worse in U.S., so that's why we are where we are.

And we showed that Canadian dollars earlier that is going up, but not only the Canadian dollar is going up, but also the reserve for the Central bank are going up in Canadian dollar.

I think the central banks are partly to blame. You've got that right, Denis. And people forget that we are the 5th largest foreign currency held by central banks. We're at 3% of the total right now. We started from nothing in 2012. We're at 3%. There's more people, foreign banks or you know, investing in Canadian dollar than in, you know, in the Chinese renminbi or the Swiss franc or the Australian dollar. So at 3%. Now you might say 3% is still small Stéfane, but the dollar amount is huge to need $450 billion. It's never happened in Canadian history that central banks own such a large part of Canadian assets or the bond market if you want. So that keeps a bid on the Canadian dollar, it explains why we are stronger than we would otherwise be. But that reflects the tremendous uncertainty facing the global economy in this punitive tariff structure that could undermine the U.S. economy in the months ahead. So.

So Stéfane, you've been telling us for many months that we need to be prudent. What do we do now?

At 26%, you're still prudent. And these tariffs got to go down. They need to go down to 10%. Seriously, Denis. So, let's be careful out there. I can't justify a stock market valuation or U.S. equities that are trading at, you know, 18 times forward earnings. I think the surprise will come from a significant deterioration in corporate earnings in the months ahead. Financing costs are up. You're selling less to the rest of the world. Clearly, that's not good for profits. So again, it will be volatile again for the next few months. So, let's be prudent out there.

Thank you, Laurent. Thank you, Stéfane. Thank you to all of you for following us for all those years. Hopefully, it's going to last many months or many years. Until then, we'll see you beginning of May. Thank you.

Hello, everyone, welcome to Economic Impact. Today is March 11, 2025 and as usual, I am with our Chief Economist, Stéfane Marion. Hello, Stéfane. A lot of change since the last time.

Good morning, Denis. We're– I guess we're getting closer to the eye of the storm here with economic data that suggests that even the almighty U.S. economy is being impacted by the potential of the tariff war. And we saw that for the first time in two years there might be a service economy that shows contraction. And that Denis, is important because that's 2/3 of the US economy, so if you hit the service sector, which was not so much exposed to the so-called tariff war, but uncertainty has done its job. This bodes for a weaker U.S. economy in the months ahead.

And above that we have the bond market that are sending us a message now.

Things are in sync now, remember when we had a discussion a few months ago, the economic data was sometimes so so but now everybody seems to be thinking the same. And from US bond market perspective, the yield curve, which is the difference between a 10-year Treasury yield and a 3-month T-bill had is now flattening again. So historically Denis when they have a flatter or an inverted yield curve that would suggest weaker growth, not faster growth. So the bond market is clearly getting a little bit more worried.

Yeah. And at the same time, we're seeing a different signal on the equity market. If you're looking at Europe versus North America,

The equity market rarely inverts, actually the beginning of a flattening of the yield curve or potential inversion. And we've seen that things have changed quite significantly since we spoke last month in the sense that the equity markets are down, way down, particularly in the US. Notice too, that might be surprising, but, you know, some parts of the world which are threatened by US tariffs, emerging markets or Europe, are actually still up on a year to date basis, whereas the US is down significantly. So there seems to be a change in mindset from investors with the uncertainty related to what the global supply chain may look like in the months or years ahead.

And you want to put also in perspective, you know, the external sector, the export in the US versus what people think really.

Yeah. So there's been some denial in Washington by politicians, but also some economists who were claiming who cares if there's a tariff war, exports account for only 11% of the US economy. My answer to that is fine, that's on the economy. But what about the US financial markets, what about the S&P 500 where 41% of sales are realized overseas? So if you threaten the tariff war and you've had a strong U.S. dollar up until recently, then obviously you will threaten the performance of the US stock market. And that's part of the reason of, you know, what I showed you before of this lack, this underperformance of the US stock market versus other parts of the world.

And talking about that, not all sectors will be affected the same. And the one that will be, we know them very well.

Yeah. And we've all heard about the Magnificent 7 for the past two years generating most of the outperformance of the US stock market. So it's the IT sector, but the IT sector generates 56% of its sales from overseas economy. So imagine that, I'm threating you with a tariff war, there might be retaliation, what's going to happen to profits of the IT sector in particular? Well, it's not going to go well and that's fully reflected in we're seeing. So what we said before the US stock market down 9% from its recent peak, but the NASDAQ you know IT sector down almost 14% Denis. Note U.S. banks down more than 16%. Why is that? Well, if you decide that you're going to get, you know, a big change in the global supply chain, presumably that would entail also that maybe it will be yes, less exchanges in U.S. dollars and 92% of global trade happens in U.S. dollar. If people say I don't want U.S. dollars under these circumstances then U.S. banks are under pressure. So again, that does suggest weaker growth in the US in the months ahead.

And because everything is in sync right now, U.S. dollar is going down too.

Yes, so if you have these– if Europe is going up while the US is going down, clearly somebody is shunning the US dollar and U.S. dollar strength has vanished in the past four weeks and you're already down 4% to 5% year to date. So people are saying, you know, having second doubts about the rationale where the only place to be with Mr. Trump was to invest in the US. People said no, maybe I need to make sure that I–

Have bigger diversification.

More diversification, geographical diversification might make sense.

Yeah. If we come back in Canada, the external sector they did quite well in the last report.

Yeah, so we did well because US corporations decided with this tariff threat we will be importing like there's no tomorrow and that probably also impacted the US dollar. Whereas in Canada well it's the mirror image, if the US were import quite aggressively, we were exporting quite aggressively. So much so Denis hat we might have the trade contribution to our economic activity in the first quarter of this year, that will be the largest since we came out of Covid, so almost 5 percentage points. So think about this Denis, I might be seeing a negative GDP in the US in the first quarter and a positive one in Canada despite that we are the one threatened by a tariff war.

But that's going to be temporary.

I don't want to be complacent. You're absolutely right. People are trying to front run the impact of the tariffs. So that won't be carried into the second-half of this year. So I think that under these circumstances, despite the fact that GDP will be stronger than expected, I think that the Bank of Canada has no option but to cut rates at its next meeting, which will be tomorrow on Wednesday, March 12th.

And there's 2 words that we know very well now, "tariff" and "regulation". And when we talk about regulation in Canada, this is something that probably we should tackle right now.

Yeah. So we make a lot of fun about the president claiming that "tariff" is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. I would say, well, don't laugh too much because it seems that in Canada, "regulation" is the most beautiful word in our policymaker’s dictionary. They have their own dictionary sometimes Denis, unfortunately. So the point I'm trying to make here, Denis, is to say you know, did you know that regulations– we now have 320,000 regulatory requirements that are impacting our corporations and the manufacturing sector and loans is 105,000. It's up 40% over the past two decades. And what that does Denis, it limits our job growth our economic activity, but more importantly, our business investment would be 9% higher were it not for this increase in regulation. So, you know, we have a new Prime Minister in Ottawa, you know, leader of the Liberal Party. We'll see what happens. But you know, as you contemplate putting tariffs against the Americans retaliation, why don't we retaliate by getting rid of these regulation and kickstarting more economic activity in our country by helping a companies. And you know what that doesn't cost so much for governments to reduce regulation when you think about it. So maybe that's the way to go or an option for us to consider.

Yeah. And the timing is perfect right now to do that, you know.

You get an opportunity like an opportunity like this once in a generation. So let's seize that opportunity.

Stéfane, what do we do now? You told us to be very careful many months ago. Now. What's the next message?

You know, I admit Denis that we told clients to be careful maybe a little bit too early. But I think at this point in time, let's – before we go in and decide to buy the market more aggressively – let's be prudent, let's you know, have a balanced portfolio and maybe start thinking about potential geographical, you know, allocation to our diversification to our asset mix. So let's be prudent for the time being. We need to confirm what the new policies will be and the tariff war, if it continues, it won't be pretty in the second half of the year. There might be more downside to equity markets.

Well, on those not so good words. Thank you Stéfane. Thank you for being with us. Hopefully you're gonna be there next month, April, and until then, be safe, be careful, and hopefully things will go better. Thank you.

Hello everyone, Welcome to Economic Impact. Today is Feb 11th, 2025 and as usual I am with our chief Economist Stéfane Marion. Stéfane, surprisingly once again, assets are doing well.

All the countries that are in the crosshairs of the US President of Washington on a tariff war are out actually outperforming the S&P 500. But more tellingly, Denis, all-asset classes are up this year so far this year. And as I said, might be surprising to see a stock market behaving so well outside the US on the premise that we understand that there's a global trade war. But whether it will be as punitive as what we think for the global economy is not the baseline scenario at this point in time. So, the market is thinking otherwise versus what the president is saying at this point in time.

At this stage, it seems that Europe and Asia are not too concerned.

Exactly. I mean, again, these are the countries that are facing the biggest threat of US tariffs right now. And yet the market's saying it will be too punitive for the US to proceed with a 25%. Doesn't mean there won't be any tariffs, Denis, but 25% tariffs will be too punitive on US inflation. Therefore, they're not, markets are not buying it right now. I think it's interesting to look at this this way, market expectations. But again, let's not be complacent because you know, something might still happen in the next few years.

Surprisingly, in Canada, we see up 3.1%. But it's not all sectors. In fact, it's only two.

That's the point, because just the sheer threat of these tariffs is fragilizing the Canadian economy. In case in point, most sectors are not behaving so well year to date. But the sector that's carrying the TSX, actually there's two. Well, you know, technology, but that's a small component of the S&P TSX, but mostly it's the materials sector up 13% year to date, really enabling the Canadian stock market to outperform the US, for example.

And with the uncertainty, there's gold and there's materials and gold is in a new high.

Well, if you're going to look at materials, you cannot not speak to gold prices because we're a big producer and that's a large chunk of the S&P TSX and gold price is that new all-time high. In nominal terms, $2900 or so U.S. dollars. Adjusted for inflation, you go back more than 50 years and it's a new all-time high. So, basically some components of financial markets saying while you were not so sure about this tariff war and the way to protect myself is to buy a tangible asset and one of them would be gold. There's probably still upside for that.

And in history gold has been, you know, a safe haven against inflation.

It could be a safe haven against U.S. dollar depreciation, but the US dollar is a new all-time high. But you're absolutely right against inflation. Gold is looking at inflation expectations right now. And this is a poll made at the consumer level and say, Denis, what do you think inflation might be a year from now? It actually has surged more than 100 basis points in the past month or so. And people saying, you know, it might be 4%, Denis, I'm telling you, if we have 4% inflation, there's no way that the Federal Reserve can ease monetary policy. So, this is why gold price is saying if you want to be aggressive on a tariff war, a global tariff war, we might keep you in check because inflation is going to be going to be higher.

Yeah. And at the same time, you know, we have rates staying pretty high in the states and the stock market doesn't go down. Then we have that, you know, what we call the first-time negative equity premium that we haven't seen for a long, long period of time, almost 20 years.

Yeah. So, if you're an investor, you say if I'm willing to take the risk to invest in the stock market, there's a there's a premium I'm willing to cope with. But if at some point the equity risk premium turns negative, that means I'm not necessarily compensated to take that type of risk in the stock market not knowing what whatever tariff war will unfold or not versus what I get to invest in something perceived to be safer. 10 year treasury yield. This is the first negative equity risk premium in a generation. That's a generation. So, this is why the stock market is vulnerable to this global tariff war. This is why we said last month that we don't think 25% users baseline scenario. We know there will be some tariffs on China. Right now, there are some, but whether they can be aggressive, or Washington can be aggressive remains to be seen without fragilizing the stock market and creating a negative wealth effect for US consumers.

And back in Canada, there's a big concern. Uncertainty is at the highest level that we haven't seen.

The Canadian economy is fragilizing. You're absolutely right. We saw it in some certain industries of the S&P TSX that we showed previously. But at the same time, if you want to go put a number on it, if you look at the index of policy, economic policy uncertainty, record high. So, it doesn't matter that we've signed free trade agreements with more than fifty countries. Corporations right now don't know how to manage their business plan because we don't know if these tariffs threats will unfold or not. That we saw this week a 25% tariff on aluminum and steel. That would be a big impact on the Canadian economy. But the tariffs are not to be applied. well, might come into effect on March 4. So we'll see what happens over the next three weeks. But clearly, you are fragilizing the Canadian economy right now with tariff uncertainty. You don't need to have the tariffs in place. The uncertainty itself is fragilizing the Canadian economy.

Yeah. And investors in those new factories and, you know, and so on. They're frozen right now. They won't do anything.

You're going to get weak investment and therefore probably weak economic activity in the first half of 2025.

That's why we need the government to be in place and put, you know, stuff that will help those industries to invest and keep the economy going, you know, up and working despite the fact what's going on South of the border.

I think there are discussions on that. Remember when we spoke to interprovincial trade barriers. Now there's more talk about this. People are talking about, you know, energy security is very important for economic sovereignty. So, we're saying, you know, a big change. We could actually aspire to policies that will be, you know, positive for the Canadian economy in the second half of 2025. The first half will be shaky, but the second half, in the meantime, what it means, Denis, is that the Bank of Canada is forced to be more aggressive on monetary policies in which they mentioned just a week ago when they ease monetary policy.

And with that uncertainty, you know, the Loonie the Canadian dollar keeps going down.

Well, since the Bank of Canada is saying that, you know, this uncertainty is fragilizing the Canadian economy. So, they're opening the door to further rate cuts. Therefore, the interest rate differential is driving the value of the Canadian dollar, which early in February when we thought that the tariffs would be imposed at the beginning of this month, it's been delayed till March, Canadian dollars went to 147, came back to 143 where we stand right now. But again, you can't forecast an appreciating dollar until we have a better visibility on tariffs or not. But at the same time, having visibility on Canadian policies will be very important to support the currency. And Denis, you know what, we want to put a positive spin on that. We believe that what's going to happen in the second half of this year should be more positive for the Canadian economy, but there's still a few weeks of uncertainty to cope with.

Well, we'll keep the positivism of your comments and thank you once again. Thank you all for joining us. We'll be back early March. Thank you. Have a good day.

Hello everyone and welcome to Economic Impact. Today is January 22nd, 2025 and as usual, I am with our Chief Economist, Stéfane Marion. Hello Stéfane.

Hi Denis.

Well, we have a lot of noise on the market so far this year and as usual can we have a look at how the market performed so far?

It's a complicated world, Denis, and sometimes you have to look at what the market is saying. And at this juncture, many people might be surprised from the fact that, you know, equity markets are actually positive year to date. And maybe except for Japan and emerging Asia, which is, you know, down very slightly. It might surprise many people to say that despite all the political noise and the tariff threats, the markets saying, well, we're not sure that's the baseline scenario where the US president would come in very forcefully and put us in a situation where we have a global tariff war. So, so far, so good. Of course, it's early in the year, but it might surprise many people to see that the markets are important.

And because of what's going on today, the presentation will be a bit different. We need to talk about, you know, the trade balance, tariff and so on and so forth. But if we start with the trade balance.

I think we want to be very clear to like, we don't know what the full answer is right now. So maybe we'll find, you know, potential solutions for Canada to deal with this uncertainty that we face right now. Now what is clear that we know from Washington is the president is annoyed with the US trade balance, which is very much, it's significant trade deficit with the entire world, 3% of GDP. Denis, it's been a long time since the US actually saw a trade surplus.

And when you compare those tariffs from where they were many, many years ago, where do we sit?

It's very low and the president will say we are tariff structure is very low, but your deficit is very large. So either you want to bring that to surplus, then your tariff structure is going to have to be very high. So, what the president is talking about is going for a tariff structure that's roughly 2% right now to something that will be equivalent to something much more punitive sometimes that we see, you know, double digit tariffs that we saw 100 years ago. But keep in mind, Denis, that back then the import content of US consumption was much smaller. Nowadays for every dollar consumed in the US, about 12 cents comes from imports. So if you want to put 25% tariffs on 12% of consumption, well, you know what it means on inflation, 2 percentage point higher, that would bring inflation closer to 5%. I don't think that's palatable for the president and I'm not sure it's palatable for the bond market.

And if we just turn back a bit to performance and instead of the stock market going to the bond market, the bond market is reacting quite differently this time around. And it's probably because of all of the uncertainty that's in the air.

So, that's why I say, we can't say for sure what the scenario will be for the balance of the year. Clearly the stock market is saying, well, I don't see much chance in a big tariff structure or a very aggressive one. But the bond market is saying, well, I'm going to give you something you've never seen and that's a 10-year treasury yield that's–

Which one is right? The bond trader or the stock trader.

We will find out in the next few months. That's why we've been telling clients, well, be careful because there's no certainty in this type of world. But I think there is something to be said to that the president is not comfortable with the 10-year treasury yield moving higher by 100 basis point since the Fed started easing interest rates. Because that what it means, Denis, is that the mortgage rates are rising in the US. So a lot of people wanted to refinance their homes and say, well, the Fed is easing. I'm going to get a cheaper rate. But you're not getting a cheaper rate because the bond market for the first time in over a generation is saying “Hey, if you're too aggressive on tariffs, there's going to be more inflation and rates will go higher”. So I think this is what the president will be keeping an eye on. And this is why there's no certainty on how we can go with the 25% tariff without hitting the US economy negatively on long term rates.

Let's come back to the, you know, the commercial balance and can we explain how does it look Canada versus what Mr. Trump is saying?

So what I showed to the bond market and what's happening in equities saying, well, I don't think he can be overly aggressive without jeopardizing economic growth in the US. But from a Canadian perspective, clearly we need to find a better response to how we approach Americans. There's no, you know, having a free trade agreement is not a given, right, right. So we need to maintain good relationships with, with the US and US saying, well, I'm subsidizing you dramatically with trade on USMCA, to which I reply: listen it is true that the Americans have a slight, you know, trade deficit with us, but it's only $32 billion.

If you put things in perspective, the 32 billion versus the whole commercial deficit in the state, it's pretty small.

Well, let's put in a number. The Americans have one thousand billion dollars, so 1 trillion in terms of deficit, but with Canada 32 billion.

Its peanuts.

3% yeah, exactly not much. And of that 3%, Denis, it's all oil and gas because the Americans actually for since 2008 are actually running a surplus outside oil. So even in terms of the balance on motor vehicles, the Americans are running a surplus. Yeah. So again, this is where we need to be very good at explaining to Americans, listen, the deficit is really oil and gas.

And they want that.

They need it because without us they wouldn't have a surplus on energy exports because they can refine the crude oil that we sell them and sell it and transform gasoline, which–

And if I recall correctly, the one that because they want to have a fair sources of gas coming from Canada instead of other country that they're not that close.

We are a de facto strategic petroleum reserve for them. You're absolutely right. And the reason for that is because we now export. So the US imports 62% of the oil from Canada via pipeline, which is quite from a national security standpoint, which is quite attractive from their standpoint. So that's why, I mean, I'm not saying it won't happen for sure, but it would be, it is unlikely that the Americans would put a 25% tariff structure on oil and gas, which they need to main keep their inflation lower.

OK, let's get very clear. If they put a 25% everywhere, how does that affect the GDP?

No one wins. OK, but from a Canadian perspective, since you're asking, it would be quite ugly. It would be a GDP drawdown, or let's call it a recession, 6 percentage point, which would be the largest recession since the 1980s when interest rates were 20% in Canada. So the point, Denis, is this is the extreme case where there's a 25% tariff on everyone and there's retaliation. Obviously we're a small open economy. Even our energy would be taxed. Then we would have a problem. But again, Denis, that's not our baseline scenario. But you wanted me to give you the extreme case. This is the extreme case that we would contend with.

That's big.

It's big, but obviously the market is not pricing. But this is if you want the extreme scenario.

Those are numbers.

Bank of Canada numbers by the way, not mine.

OK, now we can shift a little bit to the industrial sector in Canada compared to the other countries where we're not at par.

Well, here's the challenge. The politicians are saying, OK, the Americans we need to diversify our export sources, but unless we want to sell them energy and it's very hard to do because our energy goes to us via pipelines. There's no real pipeline going east-west. So if we're gonna sell stuff–

We can’t put that in boxes.

Exactly. But what we can put in boxes are the widgets that are produced by our manufacturing sector. God knows we could do better there because what we've done over the past year is, we haven't been paying attention to our manufacturing sector. We were too obsessed and moving production elsewhere. Basically we were saying, oh, let's move or production elsewhere; will be less pollution in Canada. I get that it works, because manufacturing is very energy intensive, but if production moves elsewhere and forms of energy used to produce the manufacturing are more polluting in Canada, the planet doesn't win. Now I'm not happy that we now boast to have the smallest manufacturing sector in the G7 despite the fact that we have a comparative advantage on electricity prices and natural gas which are critical for the manufacturing production process.

That was one of your battles for the past year or so that we underinvested in our industries. We thought that everything can be digital nowadays. But you know, if trade is not so secured, whether southern partner, we need to have a critical base in manufacturing. There's a critical mass that we must keep in this country. And this is where I think that this is part of the solution. Let's say, well, OK, fine, the Americans don't want to. Let's, let's build a relationship where we sell within Canada on a higher proportion than what we're doing right now.

And last but not least, you want to bring us on another thinking about tariff, but tariff between provinces that are not really tariffs.

So what concerns me is that we're saying it's not fair that the Americans want to put a 25% tariff structure on us. But since you're asking, Denis, the tariff equivalent of the trade barriers that we have between us, between the provinces in this country is a whopping 21%. When you think about it–

Do people know that?

People are not paying attention. There is a way to take those into interprovincial barriers and put them in a terrific equivalent one, 21%.

You're telling me that we are as protective between us then the Americans wants between the Canada.

You know, Americans want to put 25%. We have 21% on ourselves. And that's not normal. And that's a way where I say, OK, maybe it's frustrating for producers not to have the visibility that they want to have with the Americans. But here's the thing, I can get rid of this almost overnight and say, hey, you know what, we can increase interprovincial trade that is only 40% of our production, maybe to back to 50% where it was before the free trade agreement. So, you know, it's all not doom and gloom. If you think about it, it's an opportunity that comes only once in a generation where all the Premiers sit down and you say enough with this, that's gone and we can actually provide visibility to our producers and keep a critical mass on manufacturing. So again, Denis, yes, it's annoying, yes there's lack of visibility, not sure what the market is pricing at this point in time, but not pricing the end of the world for sure. But from a Canadian perspective, this is probably the most important chart of the presentation. Please, let's get rid of this.

Well, on that Stefane, thank you very much. Thank you for that very special presentation. Hopefully it helped you. Hopefully it was constructive and we'll see you next month in February.