The federal government is basing labour market policy on the belief that, as Jason Kenney pithily puts it in today’s Globe, there are “large and growing labour shortages.” Hence moves to bring in even more temporary foreign workers at lower than average wages, and to push EI claimants into supposedly available jobs. Not that the facts appear to matter, but […]
Read moreStatistics Canada reported today that April was another good month for the labour market. The Canadian economy added 58,200 jobs, most of which were full-time and all of which were paid positions rather than reported self-employment. Paradoxically, official unemployment increased as more Canadians entered the labour market. This development provides an important reminder that unemployment is actually even worse than […]
Read moreI wanted to tip my hat to the hard working folks at the PBO for a particularly revealing Economic and Fiscal Outlook that was published today. Â While the PBO has more than once eaten my lunch on various issue they’ve done a superb job of looking at Canada’s economic and fiscal position.
Read moreComing after several months of flat or falling job growth, the large jump in employment in March – up 82,300 – has prompted concerns that it could be a statistical aberration, due to sampling error rather than a real change. This could indeed be the case. However, the Standard Error for the national estimate of employment is 28,600 – much lower […]
Read moreStatistics Canada reported significant employment growth today for the first time in six months. As Andrew has already noted, welcome strength in March does not make up for the five preceding months of stagnation. Compared to September 2011, full-time employment has increased by 21,900 while Canada’s labour force and population (age 15+) have expanded by 59,100 and 151,000 respectively. Including […]
Read moreToday’s job numbers for March are much stronger than they have been since last September. Job creation was very strong – up 82,300 in the month, with 70,000 of those positions being full-time. The national unemployment rate fell from 7.4% to 7.2%, the level it was at last September. The youth unemployment rate also fell sharply, from 14.7% to 13.9%. […]
Read moreThe Budget estimate that a new round of cuts will eliminate up to 19,200 jobs has been widely cited as fact, but it cannot be taken at face value as argued in an analysis released by the Public Service Alliance of Canada. An extract follows: The government claims the $5.2 billion in spending cuts will mean the loss of 19,200 […]
Read moreAs a supplement to the excellent (and more timely!) posts from Andrew and Erin this morning, let me add a few points on the most striking feature of today’s Labour Force Survey: namely, the accelerating decline in labour force participation. The part rate (seasonally adjusted) fell to 66.5% of the working age population (remember, Stats Can defines working age broadly […]
Read moreStatistics Canada reported this morning that 38,000 people gave up looking for work in February. The official unemployment rate fell because these Canadians were no longer counted as being unemployed. However, this huge withdrawal from the labour force is a sign of weakness in the job market. Nationally, 25,000 of the 38,000 who dropped out were younger than 25. The […]
Read moreToday’s job numbers underscore the need for a federal Budget to create jobs rather than destroy jobs. The overall picture since September of last year has been one of job losses, a decline in the quality of jobs, and falling real wages. The recovery in the job market has stalled and gone into reverse. The national unemployment rate fell from […]
Read moreWith unemployment high and rising, job creation should surely be on the agenda. The Government of Canada has a program called Job Creation Partnerships, funded under Employment Insurance. It supports projects which “provide insured participants with opportunities to gain work experience that will lead to ongoing employment. Activities of the project help develop the community and the local economy.” (2010 […]
Read moreIf the National Post’s John Ivison wanted to agitate this blog’s authors, he could not have done much better than last week’s commentary on the census numbers. It was printed on the front page under the headline “Jobs in the West, jobless in the East; EI impeding labour mobility.†To paint a picture of eastern Canadians loafing around on Employment […]
Read moreA shorter version of this article appears today at Economy Lab, the Globe and Mail’s on-line business feature. Capitalism has entered an ugly new era, one that may work well for the shareholders of world, but not for the rest of us. I couldn’t help but notice that, on the very same day Caterpillar shuttered the doors of its London, […]
Read moreSigh. Here we go again. More evidence-free corporate policy advocacy. The Chamber of Commerce put out a report today – actually I can’t find much in the way of background research on their web site – which points with alarm to labour and skills shortages, and calls for a less generous EI program to get workers to move to the […]
Read moreLast week (Feb. 2nd) I drove up to London, Ontario, to shoot some film footage of the locked-out workers picketing outside the Electro-Motive Diesel plant for a documentary I am working on. The company, the only one to make locomotives in Canada, is owned by Caterpillar Inc., the world’s largest equipment manufacturer. They’d locked out the entire workforce of 450 […]
Read moreIt is argued that eligibility for OAS/GIS discourages older Canadians from remaining in the workforce, and that we need to keep them working to avoid labour shortages and a sharp rise in the so-called dependency ratio. But the fact of the matter is that 65 is not the trigger for retirement that it used to be, and that an increasing […]
Read moreIt was not a happy new year for Canadian job seekers. Statistics Canada reported today that unemployment rose for a fourth consecutive month in January. Overall employment remained flat as Canada’s population and labour force grew at a normal pace, leaving more workers without jobs. The good news in today’s report is that 39,200 more Canadians reported being paid by […]
Read moreCanada’s job market continued to weaken in January as employment rose by a meagre 2,300 jobs, much less than the growth in the number of workers in the labour force. As a result, the national unemployment rate rose from 7.5% to 7.6%. The unemployment rate has been steadily climbing from 7.1% last September, since which time we have lost a […]
Read moreProgressive economists have advocated expansionary fiscal and monetary policies to boost demand and create jobs, given the high rate of unemployment. By contrast, employers and conservative commentators complain of unfilled vacancies and labour shortages, emphasizing policies to increase labour supply and labour mobility. Today’s new Statistics Canada survey of job vacancies sheds fresh light on this debate. The finding that […]
Read moreFurther to my earlier post on this topic, whether or not we are or will soon be experiencing labour and skills shortages is a question of critical importance to the development of sound public policy. Next week, we will get some new Statistics Canada data on job vacancies which will help support a more informed discussion. Given projections of very […]
Read moreThe Mark have published a pre Budget commentary from yours truly.
Read moreStatistics Canada’s “real” (R8 supplementary) unemployment rate adds to unemployed persons some labour force dropouts (discouraged job seekers who have given up looking for a job in the belief that no work is available) and the hours of work lost by part-time workers who would rather have worked full-time. In 2011, the “real” rate averaged 10.6%, up significantly from the […]
Read more(Erin beat me to it but there is some new content here.) Capping a very weak last quarter, Canada’s job market ended 2011 badly as the national unemployment rate rose from 7.4% to 7.5% and we lost 25,500 full time jobs. While part time employment gains offset the losses in full time employment, this was only because of a strong […]
Read moreStatistics Canada reported today that unemployment exceeds 1.4 million for the first time in eight months. December’s unemployment figure was the highest recorded since April. And these official figures significantly understate the problem of underemployment by not counting people who have given up looking for work and part-timers who want full-time jobs. Indeed, part-time work accounted for all of December’s […]
Read moreAs is well known, the youth unemployment rate remains high, and well above average. It stood at 14.1% in November or more than double the unemployment rate of 6.3%Â for persons aged 25 to 54, and 6.2% for those aged 55 and over. What is a little bit more surprising is that the youth unemployment rate, while down from the […]
Read moreToday’s Labour Force Survey indicates that the seemingly robust economic growth reported by Statistics Canada earlier this week is not translating into improved job prospects for Canadian workers. For the second consecutive month, employment is down and unemployment is up. (By contrast, the situation improved south of the border.) Manufacturing: Another Record Low Although overall employment in goods-producing industries rose […]
Read moreI was quoted in the House of Commons question period yesterday by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. “Hon. Jim Flaherty (Minister of Finance, CPC): Mr. Speaker, I know the NDP bandies about numbers with respect to jobs, so I thought I would seek some authority about their numbers. I went to one of the large unions and I checked what they […]
Read moreThe labour market is in much worse shape than the official 7.3% unemployment rate implies. The latest evidence for this proposition is today’s miserable report on employment and earnings from Statistics Canada. Further to Andrew Jackson’s post on today’s release, most media coverage of this report focuses on year-over-year measures of growth in hourly wages and weekly wages. And on […]
Read moreInequality of well-being among families with children is increasing at an even faster rate than income inequality, according to a new study by Peter Burton and Shelley Phipps, “Families, Time, and Well-Being in Canada”. They find that total family working hours have increased for most families, but not for those at the top of the income spectrum who have been […]
Read moreIt is no secret that times of high unemployment and precarious work are especially tough for new and recent entrants to the job market, notably young workers and recent immigrants. The latter were especially hard hit in the recession and slow recovery of the 1990s, when new immigrants had great difficulty finding decent jobs and it took longer and longer […]
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