Recession may have been only 8 months: StatsCan

Canada's latest recession may have been as short as eight months, Statistics Canada suggested in a report released Thursday, making it the shortest downturn of the three over the last 30 years.

Philip Cross, chief economic analyst at the federal agency, told CBC News it isn't clear yet exactly when the downturn over 2008 and 2009 started and ended.

Gross domestic product appeared to start contracting in July 2008 while employment wasn't clearly down until the fall. And emerging from recession, output turned up before employment.

"But the differences between the two are very small and they may disappear in the future given the possibility of small revisions to this data," said Cross.

Those revisions are expected to be made final by the spring of 2012.

Depending on how those revisions turn out, the recession was anywhere from eight to 12 months long.

The report also said the contraction was less severe than the two previous ones, which started in 1990 and 1981, although both output and employment in the early stages of the downturn contracted at the fastest rate of any post-war recession.

It was also less pronounced than in other major industrialized countries, the report said.

Statistics Canada defines a recession as any extended period of weakness in the economy causing both job losses and a contraction in economic output.

Canada has regained the number of jobs lost in the downturn and output has returned to pre-recession levels as rising demand from emerging economies has pushed up commodity prices.

That has led analysts to speculate that the Bank of Canada will return to raising interest rates as early as late spring.