Andrew Kyle is a respected Realtor in Calgary and I would say his comments are very true.  Sadly many people who prefer to follow the herd will not heed these comments.  They will dismiss them as “He is a Realtor, so his comments are biased”.  He may be a Realtor but his comments are based on facts, break from the herd…you will be happy you did. Link

Seriously, think about this.  We have so much media influence from the US and this is artificially bringing consumer confidence down in Canada. Most of the time you hear that we should be feeling bad, and that we should be bracing ourselves because our biggest customer is going to go through a serious recession.Good article today confirms what we already know that the US is going to be bad, BUT it goes on to say that Canada’s recession will be weak, and in fact may not even be a recession but rather a slowdown.One of the rumours I think they are debunking is that we don’t automatically get dragged into a recession just because the Americans do.  In fact previous recessions in Canada could have been proven to be self inflicted.The last major recession we had in early 90’s saw the Bank of Canada having interest rates at 13%, and right now we see rate at 2.5% and falling.  That is a major different story and will prove to keep our economy floating.Finally look at the comparison to unemployment rates in previous recessions compared to the forecast for 2009.  Although yes it is bad that we will see our unemployment rate rise by 1% which equates into a disappointing 190,000 less people working, compare that to unemployment rates rising 4.5% during the last major recession, and seeing what is happening down south would confirm that our pain will not be as bad.The last silver lining to look at is all the news about Canada is national, meaning that most of the bad news is from our most populated region in Central Canada.  Western Canada will be fine, yes slower, but fine.