Galbraith Lecture by Mike McCracken
I always come back from the annual CEA/PEF meetings highly energized by the companionship of so many other fine committed PEF members, and our success in engaging with the broader…
unemployment
I got laid off again
I got laid off last week; today’s my first day of unemployment. There were three weeks remaining on my three-month contract, but we started running out of international tax returns…
Labour Market Stalls
Canada’s job market stalled in May. Employment edged up by 7,700, almost all of it part-time. In fact, the number of employees paid by Canadian employers fell by 15,600. Total…
Unravelling Conservative Labour Market Policy: The Maximum Wage Law.
The OECD and the CATO institute have both consistently ranked Canadian labour markets as some of the most flexible in the advanced capitalist world. Indeed, Canada ranks only second to…
Memo to Ministers: The Issue is Unemployment Not Labour Shortages
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…
Plenty of Jobs in Alberta (Alberta!!!) says Emperor Steve’s Puppet, Flaherty
Here’s good ol’ boy Flaherty warning Canadians that EI will be changed to reflect Alberta and Saskatchewan’s need for labour…as if the government was financing EI in the first place..…
a tiny glimpse into the ways our government serves the corporate and financial world, not the people of Canada
Some Key Areas Where Neoliberal Policy Undermines both the Industrial Economy and Canadian Democracy Under the Harper Regime, the investor class is constantly being protected at the expense of the…
Jobs: Ontario Left Behind
Statistics 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…
Corak in Context
Professor Miles Corak had a post on The Globe and Mail’s Economy Lab yesterday comparing measures of unemployment in Canada and the U.S. I remember learning in Economics 100 that…
Who’s a bigger drag on Canada’s future? The old or the young?
This is my latest column for Canadian Business magazine. Giorgio, a hard-working, smart-as-a-whip University of Toronto student, asked me a great question after a recent guest lecture: What if the…
Real Unemployment Rate = 11.3%
Statistics 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…
Budget 2012: Pennywise But Pound Foolish
Marc, Andrew and Toby have posted substantial analyses of yesterday’s federal budget, but here are my two cents about its economic forecasts. Table 2.1 envisions a 7.5% unemployment rate this…
Below 40% of the Unemployed Get EI
Statistics Canada reported today that 12,400 more Canadians received Employment Insurance (EI) regular benefits in January. The increase in recipients reflected higher unemployment. Indeed, the proportion of jobless workers receiving…
More on Declining Labour Force Participation
As 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…
Labour Force Exodus
Statistics 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.…
Should Ontario Become an Independent Country?
Ok just forget how crazy the questions sounds. The recent wrangling between Ontario and Alberta over the value of the Canadian dollar, oil output and the decline of manufacturing in…
New Job
The place I’ve been working since September – Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation – is great. It’s a private non-profit housing organization, and I was a tenant of theirs for years.…
EI Shrank by 100,000 in 2011
Statistics Canada reported today that the number of Canadians receiving Employment Insurance rose by 4,230 in December, a month in which unemployment rose by 6,100. The proportion of unemployed workers…
Federal cuts could push unemployment to 8%
Now that the government is planning for an $8 billion cut, the potential job losses could drive job losses to between 99,000 and 108,000 full time positions across Canada. At…
Gordon V Jackson: the corporate tax cut myth
Apparently Stephen Gordon is having a hard time figuring out where Andrew Jackson, the chief economist for the CLC, got the bizarre idea that: The argument for corporate income tax…