Yesterday, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced (too abruptly for some, mostly the finance ministers of provinces east of Saskatchewan) that the rate of annual increases of the federal-provincial social and health transfer will continue to be 6 per cent per year until 2016 and then, from that point until 2024, it will increase at the rate of inflation plus the rate of the growth of the economy, something economists call nominal Gross Domestic Product or nominal GDP.
So: Who’s got some predictions for nominal GDP going out 12 years? Well, a couple of smart guys, David Dodge and Richard Dion, a former governor and a former economist at the Bank of Canada respectively, not only have predictions for nominal GDP going out 12 years, they built a model for nominal GDP going all the way to 2031. Their chart with that number is reproduced below, taken from their rather gloomy look, published earlier this year, at just how unsustainable our rate of healthcare spending is likely to be.
Click on the table above for a bigger easier-to-read version. Click here to find this table in its original context (its a PDF and it’s on Page 3)