Receipt — The capital behind each worker: the investment record, and the productivity record beside it

A Receipt is a dated evidence summary for one product. It shows the question, the current answer, the sources, the method, the limits, and the next update.

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The question	Output per worker has grown at a crawl since the pre-pandemic peak -- a small fraction of its pace a generation ago. Public commentary blames a shortfall in investment. Is Canada actually rebuilding the productive capital behind each worker, or is the capital record falling too?
Current reading	"Canada has an investment problem" is asserted daily in public commentary, but no public surface has shown the record the way the official data actually supports it: capital per worker, by level and by asset class, on the issuer's own bases, beside the productivity record it is meant to explain. The Living Standards Brief shows that output per worker is the term subtracting from living standards when population grows faster than the economy; this Brief shows the capital record behind that term -- whether Canada has been rebuilding the productive capital each worker has to work with, or not.
Evidence reviewed through	2026-08-02
Basis	Statistics Canada's non-residential capital stock record (geometric end-year net stock, chained dollars, total all industries, annual) and business gross fixed capital formation by asset class (chained dollars and current prices, quarterly), each divided by Statistics Canada's own employment record (Labour Force Survey, seasonally adjusted, monthly, calendar-year averaged) to produce the per-worker levels this Brief reads. The official capital-intensity-contribution decomposition (multifactor productivity, annual) is cited as as-published context, not combined arithmetically with the per-worker levels. Every pinned value re-derives from archived source bytes recorded with content hashes; every computed figure is a named-formula Scenario over those pins.
Method	Pinned, cited evidence; every scenario uses a named, disclosed formula and is recomputed exactly with each rebuild of the record.
Confidence	The arithmetic is exact over pinned published figures, each re-derivable from archived source bytes recorded with content hashes; the open questions are compositional and definitional (which scope a figure covers, how far a record's lag reaches) -- this receipt keeps them visible rather than resolving them.
Next trigger	Each quarterly National Accounts release (gross fixed capital formation and GDP), or the next annual capital-stock or multifactor-productivity release, whichever is published first.
Next evidence	Quarterly National Accounts (Statistics Canada, roughly an eight-to-nine-week reference lag); the next annual capital-stock release; the next annual multifactor-productivity release.
Expiry	Valid until the next quarterly National Accounts release; a new dated Receipt is then produced against the new evidence, with its correction history intact.

Material definitions

The capital-stock record's 'total all industries' scope includes the government sector and non-profit institutions serving households alongside business industries -- a wider scope than the business-sector flow, GDP-share, and productivity records beside it. The two are never combined inside one ratio.
Per-worker figures divide a National Accounts dollar aggregate by a Labour Force Survey employment headcount -- two different survey frameworks reconciled at the ratio, with no adjustment for hours worked.
Real figures use the issuer's own chained-dollar series only, on the issuer's own fixed base year; the investment-share-of-GDP figures use current prices, the conventional share-of-GDP basis. The two bases are never mixed inside one ratio.
Calendar-year figures from quarterly seasonally-adjusted-at-annual-rates series are the average of the year's four published quarters, not a sum -- the same convention Countability's own GDP denominators use.
The long-record era ladder uses the productivity record's own era boundaries (1991, 2001, 2011, 2019) at calendar-year grain, so the capital side and the outcome side of the question read against the same clock; the 1976 window is illustrative pre-convention context -- the earliest year the monthly employment record reaches -- never a further era.
The asset-class chapter reads each of the classification's four classes (non-residential buildings, engineering construction, machinery and equipment, intellectual property products) per worker in its own chained-dollar series; chained dollars are not additive across classes, so no class is stated as a share of the total and the total appears from its own published series.
Every era and class figure is a comparison of pinned endpoint years re-derived from the archived capture bytes; nothing between endpoints is interpolated or averaged across eras.

Decisive limitations

The annual capital-stock record is current only to its latest published year, roughly two years behind the quarterly investment-flow record it accumulates from -- a recent investment change would not appear in the stock-per-worker figure for some time yet.
Statistics Canada's own official decomposition of how much of the productivity slowdown the capital record explains (multifactor productivity, capital-intensity contribution) is published only through its latest available year, roughly two and a half years behind the current quarter -- published as an evidence gap, not bridged by this Brief's own arithmetic.
No figure on this Brief asserts a causal relationship between investment and productivity in either direction; it states the stock, flow, composition, and GDP-share records side by side, on the issuer's own bases.
Era endpoint comparisons smooth everything inside an era: a decade that rose and then fell reads only as its net movement, and the era boundaries, while mirrored from the productivity record, remain conventions.
The 'total all industries' stock scope (government and non-profits included) carries through the long record and the class decomposition; the class shifts locate where the stock's composition moved, never why it moved.

Key sources and licences

Labour force characteristics, monthly, seasonally adjusted — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full
Table 34-10-0166-01, Average age measures of non-residential capital stock by industry, by asset -- Canada, original prices, average age, all industries, total non-residential — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full
Historical (real time) releases of capital and repair expenditures, non-residential tangible assets, by industry and geography, table 34-10-0278-01 -- Release member 13, "February 25, 2026": Canada, Capital expenditures, All Industries — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full
Table 36-10-0097-01, Flows and stocks of fixed non-residential capital, by sector of industry and type of asset, Canada -- total all industries, geometric end-year net stock, chained (2017) dollars, total non-residential assets (series coordinate 1.3.1.8.1.0.0.0.0.0) — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full
GDP, expenditure-based, quarterly — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full
Table 36-10-0108-01, Gross fixed capital formation, quarterly, Canada -- total business gross fixed capital formation, chained (2017) dollars, seasonally adjusted at annual rates (series coordinate 1.1.1.2.0.0.0.0.0.0) — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full
Indexes of business sector labour productivity and related measures, quarterly, seasonally adjusted — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full
Table 36-10-0208-01, Multifactor productivity, value-added, capital input and labour input in the aggregate business sector and major sub-sectors, by industry -- business sector, contribution of capital intensity to labour productivity growth, index 2017=100 (series coordinate 1.25.1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0) — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full
Infrastructure average age and remaining useful life ratio — Statistics Canada Licence text read in full

Every figure this Receipt covers can be reproduced from the named public sources under Countability's published method. If a correction is ever needed, it produces a new dated version rather than editing this one.