Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Whoo Hoo?!? Well in a year over year rate it’s lower than the 10% rate in February, but holy cow new housing prices continue to go up, that is for sure.

Now where is it most expense, see for yourself:

In Ottawa the new housing prices only went up by 2.9% which is cool, and somewhere near the inflation rate (or closer to it), than say in Calgary or Edmonton! Holy cow!

Wonder how “used” house prices are comparing?

Canada, proving to be the natural resource stronghold for the world, continues to expand the volume and cash value of our exports year over year, as the graph from Stats Canada shows. This was to be expected given the soaring prices of oil and the mineral deposits in the Canadian North as well as the farming and forestry exports.

Another interesting point made is that the U.S. while still by far Canada’s largest trading partner, is no longer as huge a consumer of Canadian products:

The United Kingdom edged out Japan as Canada’s second largest export destination last year, after the United States. Exports to the United Kingdom hit $10.1 billion, compared to $9.4 billion for Japan. The major factors in the United Kingdom’s increase were export values for gold, uranium and nickel as well as higher exports of aircraft.

Even more interesting is the graph that shows that Canadians are not importing as much from the U.S. either. As I have mentioned before the U.S. economy’s status as the “center of the economic world” continues to slowly drop. Interesting, in that the U.S. economy may need to reinvent itself (as it has many times before), to deal with the new world economic lay out.

All of this is a good thing for the Canadian economy as a whole, and points towards a better year for 2007 (but remember I was optimistic about Cisco yesterday and look what it turned out to be).