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Its strange you were rejected so soon. I'm canadian as well and havent heard anything back yet. I looked through your profile and you seem to be very strong too.

I base my knowledge primarily on what I've learnt from the econ phd admissions forum , http://www.urch.com/forums/phd-economics/ . Have a look at some of the past admission results and profiles there or better yet post your profile there if you want a second opinion. They give much more helpful advice than what you would find here if your goal is indeed economics. I didnt consider your GRE scores at all, it was more the lack of economic coursework since you dont have a single class in either micro or macro and as I understand it none of your references are economists either. I would say that you would be more competitive for a PhD if you did a masters first and caught up on the economic coursework.

1) From what I know of econ PhD admissions, you dont have much of a shot for any of the econ programs that you listed. I would try only for the masters programs at all those schools. 2) Try the GRE again. 3) You might want to consider some biostats programs. The requirements are more lax than statistics or economics programs and you can usually be co supervised by people in statistics at most places.

Cant speak much for the rest but you will get into McGill for sure, proposal or not. I'm there now so I know a bit about the admissions. The F probably kills any possible application for economics but I dont thnk it matters for biostats. Also, I would take the GRE again If I were you.

economics might work for you.

Class averages are obviously a very noisy signal though. Its not really clear how a person getting an A in a UWO math class with a C average would fare in a similar class at say UofT / McGill . I dont really know the ability of the undergraduate math student body at each of these schools but it would seem reasonable that the strong students would go to the school with the better department right after high school and so a school with a very strong department having a high class average would not really be surprising in that sense since all the strong students went there to begin with. Basically class averages dont mean much without perfect information which no one really has. A student with good grades is taken at face value of being good though regardless of school, I dont think people look at averages for exactly the reasons mentioned above.

The grade inflation situation in canada is similar to the states in the sense that math departments inflate grades while others dont. I dont think you can label the entire country as being one or the other.

I'm kind of similar to you in the sense that my undergrad was also in economics & math while my masters is in pure math / stats. I'm trying the opposite route though where I'm going back to economics for my PhD. Heres what I can tell you after talking with my stats profs/advisors about grad school for the last 2 years. 1) Taking more courses in stats/prob at this point wont make or break your application so really take whatever interests you. As long as your undergrad/MA gpa is decent and there are no red flags in serious courses, the marginal benefit of taking more courses from a signaling perspective at this point is very limited. 2) An RA job in the biostatistics department is great if you can get it but I dont think it would help you much in the application process unless you really stand out to your supervisor in the next 4-5 months. So get the job if you can and take a call after a few months of work if you want to use him as a reference or not. 3) If possible, dont use all economist references especially if you plan to apply for biostats. Try to get some references from people in stats , maybe from the professor you took graduate math stats with for example.