Crowley’s Red Hot Labour Market
Brian Lee Crowley’s latest column shows he’s a glass-half-full kinda guy. We shouldn’t be worried about unemployment because a) it’s old-fashioned, b) Boomers had it worse (and now they’re getting…
Angella MacEwen
EI and CPP Appeals consolidation begins
Regulations guiding the new Social Security Tribunal came into force April 1st, 2013, and are available online at the Canada Gazette. The SST combines the first and second level of…
Back to Balance in Nova Scotia
The Nova Scotia provincial government is set to introduce its promised balanced budget this year. The Nova Scotia Alternative Budget, released today, proposes some concrete choices rooted in Nova Scotia…
EI: It’s all in the details
What not to say in an interview if you’re on EI, and other nightmares The latest detail to emerge about the recent changes to EI is from the Digest of…
Getting the Facts Straight on EI Changes
In a guest post at the Broadbent Institute, I flesh out some of the impacts of EI changes with three (fairly typical) hypothetical stories of unemployed Canadians. There are certainly…
Job Market Worsens in January
After five months of job gains, the job market turned dismal in January. Officially, the unemployment rate fell from 7.1% to 7.0%, the lowest it’s been since December 2008. This…
Labour Market still weak: Bank of Canada
The Bank of Canada released their January 2013 Monetary Policy Report. Of note, the Bank downgraded its growth expectation for 2013 to 2.0% from 2.3%, and expects the Canadian economy…
Pushback on EI Changes
It has been a week and a half since changes to the definition of suitable employment and reasonable job search have come into effect. Already, a single mom in Prince…
Re-defining (Un)Employment Insurance
Several key changes to Employment Insurance came into effect on Sunday. The EI program is about to get Grinch-ier, especially for who happen to have needed it more than once.…
Gender Wage Gap hurts Economic Growth
BREAKING NEWS: Women are paid less than men across OECD countries. OK, it’s not breaking news. Not even close. In Canada the ‘Female to Male earnings ratio’ has hovered around…
The Harper Government’s New Math
Every time this government crows about its job creation record, I cringe. They have moved the finish line and declared victory. No reason to worry about the unemployed here, folks.…
Stay the course
The Fall Economic Update was hosted this week by the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce. It seems Minister Flaherty wanted to be sure of friendly faces when he announced that the…
Fewer Unemployed Eligible for Benefits
The annual Employment Insurance Coverage Survey is out, here. The rate of eligibility for regular benefits from Employment Insurance is the lowest since 2003, the earliest year that there is…
We can do better
So there were 52,000 new jobs in September, but we needed 72,500 to keep up with labour force growth. 33,800 of those jobs were self-employed workers, and none of those…
Income Inequality & twitter
Armine Yalnizyan had a great twitter debate with Andrew Coyne on poverty and inequality, that Trish Hennessey storified here: http://bit.ly/QwHGJB I think it bears repeating that GDP growth has far…
Measuring Youth Unemployment
Miles Corak has a great post up about Paul Krugman’s “favourite gauge” of unemployment, the employment rate. Looking at the ratio of employed to population for working age men, he…
Tax Cuts, Dead Money, and Lackluster Jobs Growth
Over the past year, the Canadian labour force has grown by 185,000 people, but we have only added 176,600 jobs. The population grew by 1.2%, but employment only grew by…
July Job Numbers Fall
Statistics Canada’s monthly job numbers are out, and it doesn’t look great. After big jumps in March and April, there was little change in May and June. In July, total…
Youth employment trends
As a follow-up to my last post, where I showed R7 – the unemployment rate that includes involuntary part-time, I was curious what the longer term trend was regarding youth…
Student Employment Rate Sinks
In the summer months, Statistics Canada collects labour force data on students who were attending school full time in March, and who intend to return full time in the fall.…