The high-and-mighty vitriol which greeted Tom Mulcair's comments last week about the downside of oil-powered currency appreciation is lamentable (repeating the over-the-top reaction to Dalton McGuinty's similar comments a few weeks ago). Mulcair made two modest and empirically substantiated statements: the loonie is sky-high as a result of the oil boom in Alberta's bitumen sands (I doubt you'd find a single currency trader on Bay Street who would disagree with that), and that overvaluation is causing negative side-effects on other industries and regions in Canada.

Want to know why Canada's currency is sky-high despite our sluggish recovery, our large and persistent current account deficit, and our lousy export performance?

Check out this fascinating story in Friday's National Post, by Yadullah Hussain, on why Canada's oil reserves are such a uniquely hot commodity in the eyes of global oil corporations.

Statistics Canada released the third-quarter GDP numbers yesterday, and on the surface they seem pretty upbeat, considering all the doom and gloom lately. Headline real GDP grew at an annualized 3.5 per cent rate. I predicted a few weeks back that there was no chance that the 3Q number would be negative (thus sparing us a "technical recession," on the tails of the GDP contraction in the second quarter). But I certainly didn't expect a number that strong.