It’s quite remarkable how many economic charts show the US and Canadian economies tracking along similar paths up until “something” happened in 2015 that knocked the Canadian economy well below the US trend line. I wonder what happened in 2015 that could account for this quite visible change in fortune?
GDP growth in Canada fell off a cliff over the period from 2015 onwards. This kinda matters.
Throughout the 2025 campaign, the Conservatives have frequently referred to what they call the “Lost Liberal Decade”, a reference to the fact that Canada has lagged dramatically on virtually every available indicator since the Liberals first came to power in 2015.
In sum, the economy is worse, crime is worse, public services are worse, affordability is worse — and there’s a whole galaxy of niche indicators, such as firearms incidents, refugee backlogs, even life expectancy, that are worse than they’ve ever been.
Below, a quick guide to the fact that, whatever you think of the Liberals, the last decade has really not been great for Canada.
In the year the Liberals took office, 604 people were murdered across Canada. This was already a slight uptick from the year before, when murder rates hit a low not seen since the mid-1960s.
Just seven years later, in 2022, homicides would hit a high of 874. In raw numbers, that’s 270 more murdered Canadians.
But even when accounting for population growth, there are way more murders happening now than in 2015. The homicide rate in that year was 1.71 murders per 100,000 people. As of 2023, the most recent year for which Statistics Canada has released data, it was 1.94.
Put another way, if Canada had stuck to the homicide rates of 2015, we’d have had 94 fewer murders in 2023, 216 fewer murders in 2022, and about 150 fewer murders in 2021.
And it’s a similar story when it comes to virtually every other category of crime. Statistics Canada maintains a “crime severity index” that attempts to aggregate the raw amount of criminality each year in Canada. The index bottoms out just before the Liberals came to power in 2015, and has been on the upswing ever since.
Unfortunately, this is particularly true when it comes to violent crime. For one thing, the number of guns being turned on people each year in Canada has never been higher.
In 2015, for every 100,000 Canadians, there were 28.6 incidents of firearm-related violent crime. By 2022, the last full year for which data is available, this had surged to 36.7 incidents — nearly a 30-per-cent increase in just seven years.
The Correctional Service of Canada publishes annual statistics on incarceration rates, and a noticeable trend begins to emerge starting in 2015: The prison population begins to plummet.
