Today Statistics Canada released their first set of job numbers since the ‘oops’ of July 2014. And the news was dismal. The labour market shed 112,000 private sector positions, the largest single month drop in the private sector since, well, forever. Coming on the heels of a mistake is unfortunate,
Continue readingTag: employment
The Progressive Economics Forum: Revised LFS Numbers Don’t Change the Big Picture
What a rough week it’s been over at Statistics Canada. It’s a world-renowned statistical agency — though its lustre has been tarnished in recent years by budget cuts, cancelled data programs and series, and the nonsense of the Harper government’s libertarian crusade against the long form census. The problems this
Continue readingTHE FIFTH COLUMN: Much Ado About Religious Accommodation
Much is being made of a decision by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) managers at Toronto’s Pearson airport to allow a small group of Hindu priests to avoid screening by female border guards to comply with their religious beliefs.
Apparently some f…
Continue readingTHE FIFTH COLUMN: Much Ado About Religious Accommodation
Much is being made of a decision by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) managers at Toronto’s Pearson airport to allow a small group of Hindu priests to avoid screening by female border guards to comply with their religious beliefs. Apparently some female CBSA officers feel that they were discriminated against
Continue readingTHE FIFTH COLUMN: Much Ado About Religious Accommodation
Much is being made of a decision by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) managers at Toronto’s Pearson airport to allow a small group of Hindu priests to avoid screening by female border guards to comply with their religious beliefs. Apparently some female CBSA officers feel that they were discriminated against
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Dismal job numbers for June
Statistics Canada’s release of job numbers for June look truly dismal. The unemployment rate rose to 7.1%, and there was a loss of 9,400 jobs compared to May. Year over year, employment rose by only 72,000. That’s a weak 0.4% and the lowest year-over-year increase since February 2010. An even
Continue readingTHE CANADIAN PROGRESSIVE: Temporary agency workers struggling with low pay and economic insecurity: CCPA report
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives examined the rise of temporary agency work in British Columbia, proposes reforms to better protect workers. The post Temporary agency workers struggling with low pay and economic insecurity: CCPA report appeared first on THE CANADIAN PROGRESSIVE.
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Labour market stagnant
Erin has already commented that the tiny silver lining of 26,000 net new jobs in May covers a net loss of full-time jobs. In fact, if you compare this May to May 2013, we see that all of the net job gain in the past 12 months is part-time work
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Benjamin Zycher’s Eight-Year Itch
The controversy regarding the mathematical errors in the Ontario PCs’ “million jobs plan” went viral last week, after a critical mass of economists weighed in to confirm that the party had indeed badly misinterpreted the findings (by as much as 8 times over) of their own consultants’ studies. This sparked
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: More on Conference Board Model of Corporate Tax Cuts
Further to my post yesterday about how the Ontario PCs have vastly overstated their own consultants’ estimates of the number of jobs produced by their various policy proposals (including lower corporate taxes, lower electricity prices, interprovincial free trade, and regulatory reduction), some have asked me about precisesly how the Conference Board
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Rental Housing in Yellowknife
Yesterday I blogged about rental housing in Yellowknife, over at the Northern Public Affairs web site. Specifically, I blogged about a recent announcement by the city’s largest for-profit landlord that it plans to “tighten” its policies vis-a-vis renting to recipients of “income assistance” (which, in most parts of Canada, is
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Major Numerical Problems in Tim Hudak’s Jobs Plan
When Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak kicked off the current election campaign with a plan to “create a million new jobs” in Ontario, he tried to dress up the platform launch with a certain scientific respectability. The party released a “technical backgrounder” showing the precise composition of the million new jobs,
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Hudak job cuts impact on communities
Today the Ontario Federation of Labour and CUPE Ontario published calculations I prepared of how Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak’s promise to eliminate 100,000 public sector jobs will be felt at the local level, on cities and communities across the province. The original OFL release provides info on the magnitude of these impacts for
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: More on Demographics, Demand, and Canada’s Falling Employment Rate
My post last week on the continuing decline in the employment rate in Canada (to below 61.5% in April, barely higher than the low point reached in the 2008-09 recession) has sparked some continuing discussion about the role of demographic change in explaining that decline (as opposed to a shortage
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Austerity Bites, Employment Rate Falls Again
Today’s labour force numbers are ugly, there’s no other word for it. Employment down 29,000 jobs. Paid employment (ie. not counting self-employment) down 46,000 jobs. The only reason the unemployment rate held steady (at 6.9%) is because labour force participation fell again: by almost 2 tenths of a point, to
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: How NOT to Create A Million Jobs
It was almost too painful to watch: Tim Hudak and top Conservative luminaries kicked off their campaign for the 2014 Ontario election in a Toronto music recording studio. Problem: that studio (like others in the business) is supported in part by recording and production industry grants from the provincial government
Continue readingIlluminated By Street Lamps: Temporary Foreign Workers: What Canada Must Do To Protect A Vulnerable Labour Class
By Joe Fantauzzi @jjfantauzziKey Findings and Recommendations:– Between 2003 and 2012, the number of temporary foreign workers admitted to Canada jumped from 102,932 to 213,573 — a difference of 107.5%.– Inquests are mandatory in Ontario when an on-the-job accident kills a worker employed at “a construction project, mining plant or mine, including
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: More Evidence that Temporary Foreign Worker Program Takes Jobs Away from Canadians
Yet another report, this time by SFU Public Policy Professor Dominique M. Gross, finds evidence that Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program is bad for domestic workers. The report looks at BC and Alberta specifically and concludes that the expansion of the TFW program between 2007 and 2010 resulted in an
Continue readingIlluminated By Street Lamps: Ontario: A leading jurisdiction for intense, coercive neoliberalism
By Joe Fantauzzi@jjfantauzzi Global capitalism has liberalized incrementally since the end of the Second World War. As the Keynesian welfare state fell out of favour in the late 1970s amid a stagnating economy and rising government spending, a new business-friendly approach dubbed neoliberalism (literally, “new liberalism”), emerged and ushered in
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: He-cession to She-precarious recovery?
As Armine has pointed out recently, women play a key role in economic recoveries: (She says it so well, I have to quote her directly:) Every recession is a “he-cession”: men lose more jobs than women in a downturn because the first thing to slow is the production in goods-producing
Continue reading