Canadian Mining and Manufacturing Stumble
Statistics Canada reported today that the economy shrank in February, driven by declines in resource extraction and manufacturing. Oil and gas extraction as well as hard-rock mining decreased due to…
manufacturing
Canadian Deindustrialization
I thought I had been reading Jim’s posts carefully enough, but I was still kind of stunned when I did a quick stat check to respond to a comment on…
The Loonie’s Stagnant Purchasing Power
The following note also appears on Business Insider. I owe Paul Tulloch a hat tip for reminding me of these issues in a good comment on my last post. When…
Santa Claus Delivers a Positive Quarter Despite Corporate Scrooges
The Month: Christmas Gift Canada’s economy was buoyed by Christmas cheer as a December bounce more than offset slight declines in October and November to turn the fourth quarter positive.…
Three CEOs in One Room: Walmart, Coca-Cola, Unilever
Some of the biggest CEOs in Canada come together for the Walmart Green Student Challenge. I took this rare opportunity to ask them: Where is sustainability going for Canadian industries?…
McGuinty’s Business Tax Breaks
An interesting nugget in last week’s Drummond report is Table 11.1, an updated version of Table 2 from “Ontario’s Tax Plan for Jobs and Growth” (2009). It provides a sectoral…
Is Labour Doomed?
Last 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…
Keynesian Productivity
Statistics Canada released an interesting study today on the slowdown of productivity growth in Canadian manufacturing. Conservative economists tend to view productivity as a microeconomic issue, reflecting the allocation of…
Record-Low Manufacturing Employment
Today’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…
Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Jim Stanford points out that when it comes to manufacturing, any talk of an “invisible hand” doing much for productivity is based purely…
Neo Liberal Globalization Kills Good Jobs
Well, you’ve heard that kind of line from labour and the left, but now the IMF seems to have been pretty much won over to the argument that global supply…
Coca-Cola: A Case Study In Sustainability
How does Coca-Cola integrate sustainability into their operations? For several years its facility in Brampton, Ontario, one of its largest in North America, has been transforming its manufacturing and distribution…
Ontario and Equalization Payments: ‘have-not’ actually means ‘has-no-oil’
In the two years since Ontario officially joined the ranks of the ‘have-not’ provinces, the volume of equalization payments received has jumped 534%. That’s right – 534%. From the first…
Use University Research to Increase Manufacturing Jobs
Manufacturing jobs have been declinining as a percentage of total jobs in most OECD countries for several decades, with Ontario being especially hard-hit as a jurisdiction. At the end of…
Going Green to Bring in the Green.
A Cambridge, Ontario metal fabrication company, VeriForm, has become an ecological leader in a field notorious for neglecting the effects of their business and product on the environment. A capital…