Business Brief: Charts to watch in 2026
By Jason Kirby
Published January 5, 2026
Good morning. If a picture tells a thousand words, a good chart can convey an equal abundance of insight, which is why we asked scores of experts to pick their charts to watch for the economy in the year ahead. That’s in focus today, along with a closer look at oil after the capture of Venezuela’s leader.
Charting the year ahead
Hi, I’m Jason Kirby, an economics reporter with The Globe and Mail and avowed chart nerd.
Around this time of year, for more than a decade, I’ve reached out to dozens of economists, analysts and business leaders with a request: Pick a chart you think will be important for the coming year and briefly explain to our readers why.
And each time, they’ve responded in droves. This year was no different, with experts sending me almost 60 charts on everything from weak business investment and rental home construction to stablecoins and potholes.
For this year’s chart collection we divided the submissions into seven broad categories. Here’s a sample from several of those to give you an idea of what’s on offer.
Housing
After a spectacular run-up in prices, the past few years have been difficult for the housing market, notes Robert Kavcic, a senior economist with BMO Capital Markets. And a number of strong headwinds remain in place, from lower immigration to the evaporation of speculative fever now that rock-bottom borrowing costs have normalized.
By putting the current market in the context of Ontario’s market in 1990 and the U.S. housing correction in 2007, he argues, “The long process of resetting valuations, from affordability and investment perspectives, is now well underway … and not quite done yet.”
Trade
Canada’s ability to diversify its exports away from its dependence on the U.S. market was a big theme among this year’s chart contributors, given what’s at stake in 2026 as the trade war drags on and the North American trade agreement comes up for review.
As Beata Caranci, chief economist with TD Bank notes, Canadian companies are “succeeding in rotating their export markets faster than many analysts expected. Tapping into 27 trading partners, Canadian firms have recovered nearly $11-billion of the $18.5-billion loss to the United States. However, the nature of trade has shifted, leaving industries in the winner and loser column.”
Jobs and households
Canada’s job market in 2025 fared better than many people expected when the trade war with the U.S. broke out. One of the charts in this year’s package from Scotiabank economist Derek Holt even shows that the Canadian job market has outperformed that of the U.S. this year.
Still, there’s no sugarcoating the fact that job prospects in Canada have deteriorated.
This chart from Brendon Bernard, senior economist at online job listing company Indeed.com, captures one facet of that weakness: the rate of people switching jobs fell to new lows in 2025, in part reflecting fewer opportunities. As Bernard notes, “a healthy rate of labour market churn is an important feature of a dynamic economy, so reversing the decline in the job switching rate will likely be an important part of getting the Canadian labour market out of its current funk.”
Markets
As Alexander MacDonald, a portfolio manager with Focus Wealth Management, notes, the 2025 boom in all things AI-related created a bifurcated market of have and have-not tech stocks on the S&P/TSX Composite Index, with the gap in performance between the best-performing and worst-performing Canadian tech stocks at the widest margin in two decades.
If the AI boom continues, the winners could keep winning. But given the extreme energy demands from AI alone, “if physical or financial limits do end up causing the pace of AI’s development to slow, today’s have-not stocks may become tomorrow’s haves.”
An oil giant fixer-upper
After U.S. forces captured Venezuela’s socialist leader, Nicolás Maduro, Trump vowed U.S. oil giants would “go in, spend billions of dollars to fix the badly broken infrastructure” of the country’s oil industry. No one, other than apparently Trump, thinks it will be easy, and Venezuela’s oil production has suffered badly since the mid-2000s. But if successful, Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, could pose a competitive challenge to Canadian oil exports to the U.S.
www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-business-brief-charts-to-watch-in-2026/
