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This paper examines the emergence of private debt-led growth in Canada since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) by means of a growth regimes and macroeconomic policy regime assessment. Examining each of the four business cycles in the 1983-2020 period, roughly encompassing the entirety of the neoliberal period, results demonstrate the emergence of a 'rising' weakly export-led growth regime in the early 1990s, a shift to a 'falling' weakly export-led regime by 2001, and a turn to a debt-led private demand regime since the GFC. The macroeconomic policy regime then identifies the structural changes and policy factors which have contributed to Canada's shifting growth regime. While price competitiveness played an important role in the first three cycles, it failed to re-establish an export-led regime in the postGFC period due to decreased non-price competitiveness. Instead, the post-GFC combination of negative real interest interests which encouraged the accumulation of private debt and fiscal policy which ex post did not address the negative financial balances of the household sector supported the turn to private debt-led growth.

We review post-Keynesian contributions to demand and growth regime analysis. First, we distinguish the Kalecki-Steindl approach and the Sraffian supermultiplier approach as relevant theoretical foundations for demand and growth regime research, with investment-driven and distribution-led growth in the focus of the former and autonomous demand-led growth in the latter. Based on this, we review different ways of analysing the co-existence of demand and growth regimes in the current period of neoliberal and finance-dominated capitalism. We distinguish, first, a basic national income and financial accounting decomposition approach, second, a Sraffian supermultiplier inspired growth decomposition approach, and, third, several lenses looking at growth drivers. We argue that these three levels of analysis are, in principle, not mutually exclusive nor even contradictory, but that they rather complement each other. We conclude that, in particular the PK analysis of growth drivers provides several systematic links with comparative and international political economy approaches, when it comes to the introduction of the political economy dimension (social blocs, growth coalitions, changes in institutions favouring certain type of re-distribution and economic policies, etc.), while the national income and financial accounting, as well as the Sraffian supermultiplier growth accounting decomposition approaches provide the consistent macroeconomic foundations for such syntheses.