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Comment by nightowl_games | Hacker News Reader

As far as I understand it, Canada's economy is wholly dependent on the tar sands.

Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction accounts for 8.21% of Canada's GDP. So, not so much, but let's all take a moment to stare at the horror show that is the 13% that is real estate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada

Edit: I realize that source is from 2020, which may be skewing those numbers, but it seems that statista still roughly agrees in 2024.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/594293/gross-domestic-pr...

And worth saying that not all of the petroleum industry in Canada is oil sands, wikipedia (I'm lazy) gave a figure of 64% for the oil sands, so 36% is still the conventional pumpjack crude that's not as polluting (albeit still polluting) as oil sands, and not as dependent on gas prices being high to be viable.

> let's all take a moment to stare at the horror show that is the 13% that is real estate.

12% in both USA (2023) and Mexico (2015). Other countries that use a similar classification seem to also be in the same range. Japan, for example, also sits at 12% (2022).

Is a single percentage point really that horrific?

This is the most interesting bit of information in this entire comments section:

Japan, which has a completely different view, model, and concept of real estate that does NOT treat it as an investment, ends up with the same portion of GDP locked/used/coming from real estate.

I feel like there's important information in that tidbit, but I am not equipped to grasp it.

One possible takeaway is that just maybe real estate isnt a parasitic zero-sum activity that some make it out to be.

That developing, renovating, bankrolling, managing, and maintaining physical infrastructure is real work and creates real value.

Real estate is 3-5% of GDP for construction of new homes. And 12-13% for housing. That includes rent, but also the owner's imputed rent that they would pay. I think sales are counted as capital gains and I think not included in GDP.

I'm not too surprised that countries have similar housing, there is percent of rent that can afforded. I'm surprised that higher home prices aren't reflected, but that may show up as higher overall GDP.

It is when real estate prices are massively inflated. If houses cost 50% more than they're worth, it would mean that 4% of the Canadian economy is completely imaginary and based solely on speculation.

A healthy chunk of that real estate and construction GDP is the result of oil and gas extraction. Most of Canada's largest exporting companies are oil, mining, or derivatives related.

> A healthy chunk of that real estate and construction GDP is the result of oil and gas extraction.

Is it? I'd be interested in numbers to qualify that claim.

Modern numbers at a provincial level show that it's much higher than 13% in 2024. Canada is slowly becoming a massive housing/real-estate bubble.

given the housing shortage in both US and Canada, I think we would want the portion of GDP coming from real-estate new home construction to be even higher.

It's 1.7% of Canada's GDP. Significant, but not wholly dependent.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1319179/canada-oil-sands...

But it's 1/3 of Alberta's GDP.

The GHG impact is pretty huge though (2.2x regular oil extraction per barrel).

Alberta. Ontario and even Quebec and maybe BC actually have industry.

BC has Coal as it's number 1 export, and logging a close second.

“Almost all of the thermal coal Canada produces comes from coal mines in Alberta and is exported, mainly to Asia, from ports in B.C.”

https://globalnews.ca/news/10392382/canada-coal-exports/

More than half of Canada's coal production is metallurgical coal, suited for steel production. Most of that is mined in BC and exported. The grandparent comment and the above response are both true.

Washington state refuses to allow for coal export terminals, while California’s two coal export ports are too small, so a lot of western American coal is exported via BC also.

It's a high share on Alberta, but definitively not close to "the entire economy"

According to the most recent Statistics Canada's National Economic Accounts, the Mining and Oil and Gas Extraction industry accounted for approximately 26% of Alberta's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2020, an increase from 23.3% in 2010.

However that 23.3% undersells its importance. Primary industries like mining, oil and gas extraction have large knock on effects on the rest of the economy. Many of the retail and service companies would go out of business if the fossil fuel industry were to disappear overnight.

Right. I wish we had a better metric than GDP for capturing the downstream impacts of an industry.

Say a town grows up around a single manufacturing plant. That plant might only account for 30% of the town's GPD because people use their wages to buy food, housing, etc. But when that plant closes up and 90% of the towns income disappears, it's hard to argue that the plant only contributed 30% of the economy in that case.

GPD != economy. GPD describes how money is spent, not necessarily in what order it is generated.

Does the notion of a GDP even make sense for a town? I've never seen it applied to any unit except nations as a whole (or the EU).

I suspect you need to collect reliable information on imports and exports and capital flows to calculate GDP, and a town can't collect it because it doesn't have, e.g., a customs bureacracy.

> Does the notion of a GDP even make sense for a town?

Yes, of course it does. Why wouldn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP

You can't eat cars, coal, and oil. If you're trying to say only those matter.

Once upon a time, whale oil from whaling was a major factor in the Canadian economy. Then whale oil was replaced by kerosene and then the electric lightbulb. Tar sands will go the same way, and Canada's booming wind turbine economy will replace it to some extent (wind power can be exported in several different forms).

Not at all and has never been the case, maybe only in some regions of Alberta like a century ago [1].

The largest oil reserves in the planet, though, are in Canada, unfortunately it's all unconventional.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_indus...

That used to be the case, now it's real estate.

Real estate is about 13% of Canada's GDP[1]. It's considerable, but hardly "wholly dependant". This number is very similar to the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada

Ah yes, you've been fooled by the oil and gas propaganda. The entire oil and gas industry is only 3.2% of Canada's GDP. However, you'll never hear that from the army of O&G lobbyists who permanently reside in Alberta 24/7.

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