The February GDP number came out yesterday, so it's time for my quarterly exercise in trying to come up with a preliminary estimate for quarterly GDP growth a month before Statistics Canada makes its first announcement. As regular readers will no doubt be weary of being reminded, the estimate is based on the GDP numbers for the first two months of the quarter along with the information in the LFS release for the third month. The most recent exercise is here.

The number I get for the annualised growth rate for GDP in the first quarter of 2012 is 1.6%.

This may seem a bit high, especially since the 0.1% increase in January was more than offset by the 0.2% drop in February. There are two reasons why the estimate came in at 1.6%:

• December GDP growth was very high: 0.5%. Even if January and February saw no growth – which is pretty much what happened – January and February will still be that much higher than October and November.
• The March Labour Force Survey release showed strong growth in both in employment and hours worked. The backcast I have for March GDP is 0.4%.

Here is the track record of these preliminary estimates, such as it is:

Quarter	WCI estimate	First StatsCan release	Latest data
2009Q1	-6.9%	-5.4%	-7.9%
2009Q2	-3.4%	-3.4%	-3.7%
2009Q3	-0.4%	0.4%	1.7%
2009Q4	4.0%	5.0%	5.0%
2010Q1	5.5%	6.1%	5.6%
2010Q2	2.7%	2.0%	2.3%
2010Q3	1.5%	1.0%	2.5%
2010Q4	1.9%	3.3%	3.1%
2011Q1	3.8%	3.9%	3.7%
2011Q2	0.1%	-0.4%	-0.6%
2011Q3	3.1%	3.5%	4.2%
2011Q4	1.3%	1.8%	1.8%
2012Q1	1.6%