It’s that time of year to bring back one of The Hub’s favourite traditions: giving our readers a head’s up on what they can expect in the year to come. As for how well our contributor’s crystal balls work, well, check out last year’s predictions and judge for yourself. Looking ahead, here are some can’t-miss predictions for 2025.
The on-again/off-again recession will finally arrive
By Livio Di Matteo, a professor of economics at Lakehead University
Despite the absence of consecutive negative quarters of real GDP growth, Canada over the last few years has been on a perpetual recession watch. Economic doom-mongers will be pleased to know that the recession so eagerly anticipated by pundits and commentators will finally arrive in 2025. Employment growth—aside from the public sector—has slowed and the unemployment rate is up. It is telling that while November 2024 saw 51,000 jobs added to the Canadian economy, public sector employment accounted for 45,000 of them.
This is not sustainable, given what is coming down the pipeline in terms of economic growth. Population growth will finally subside in 2025 and it has been the main output driver over the last few years. Interest rates will come down, but as the old adage goes, you can lead horses to water, but you can’t make them drink. Notwithstanding the Santa Claus largesse from federal and provincial governments with their tax holidays and cash handouts, consumers will be shy to spend, given cost increases. And when it comes to productivity-enhancing business investment, there have been only sips rather than binge drinking.
Finally, the swearing-in of U.S. president-elect Trump in January will be accompanied by tariffs—not 25 percent—but even at 10 or 15 percent, they will deliver the coup de grâce to a slowing Canadian economy. There will be tariffs because Donald Trump not only wants them, but more than anything else, he wants their revenue for his fiscal agenda. In the end, for Trump it’s not really about the border or fentanyl, it’s all about the money. Happy New Year!
AI will take over our classrooms and school gender wars will subside
By Paul W. Bennett, director, Schoolhouse Institute, an adjunct professor of education at Saint Mary’s University, and chair of researchED Canada
Roving at large in K-12 Canadian education does alert you to emerging trends and fads that come in cyclical fashion. The overhyped “Great Reset” with its transformation to 21st-century learning competencies will not arrive, yet again. Students, parents, and schools will continue the gradual recovery from the educational fallout of the pandemic shutdowns and its collateral damage. Much of the recovery will come through osmosis rather than intentional policy. For signs of recovery keep your eye on the key indicators: student absenteeism and scores on literacy and numeracy rather than problematic data testifying to the advance of critical thinking and nebulous skills associated with so-called “social and emotional learning.”
Five fearless predictions for Canadian education:
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will infiltrate classrooms with teachers left to develop guardrails and coping mechanisms. Two-thirds or more students will use AI to complete daily assignments and text publishers will roll out chatbots to produce teacher aids such as lesson plans, quizzes, and customized assignments.
2. Smartphones may be kept at bay in classrooms. Social media addiction will continue to bedevil students, parents, teachers, and schools until it is addressed as a broader public health crisis.
3. Standardized provincial assessments will return and be introduced, for the first time, in Saskatchewan, as school authorities and parents look for more reliable post-pandemic benchmarks of student progress and learning outcomes.
4. Gender wars will subside as provincial Child and Youth Advocate offices intervene, following New Brunswick’s lead, to mediate between trans kids, parents, and educators.
5. Canada’s national education caretaker, the Council of Ministers of Education Canada, will cease to be invisible and under greater scrutiny as Canadians grow more alarmed by declines in student scores on international tests.
