The Progressive Economics Forum

John Richards tells us “tough love” was the right public policy stance for governments to take in the mid 1990s.  In his report released today by the C.D.Howe Institute, Reducing Lone Parent Poverty: A Canadian Success Story,Richards tells us that the tightening of access to welfare and the imposition of workfare was the kick-in-the-butt that [...]

I just had a telling experience with the CBC in Vancouver. Their show “On the Coast” was doing a piece on the discriminatory experience of a young women who applied for a job at Joey Restaurants. She went through their training period (which consisted largely of tips about how to dress and apply makeup), but [...]

I was pleasantly surprised to see a report published yesterday by Don Drummond and Francis Fong at the TD Bank on the Changing Canadian Workplace.  
It provides a short but decent summary of some different issues affecting labour: macro trends, educational requirements, changing composition, women, immigrants, aboriginal Canadians, older workers, widening income gaps, income security, etc.  
These are [...]

Today’s day-after-International-Women’s-Day story in the New York Times by Nancy Folbre links to four indices of gender equity.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/the-worlds-best-countries-for-women/
How is Canada doing?
Canada ranks 4th in the Human Development Index (we were number one for eight years) as well as the UNDP Gender Development Index, behind Norway, Australia and Iceland. Norway has been ranked the [...]

Last weekend, I spoke at a community event celebrating International Women’s Day in Vancouver. It got me thinking about the status of women in the Canadian economy, reflecting both on the successes over the last half century and on the areas where work is still needed to achieve gender equality.
As a young woman in Canada, [...]

The Globe seems rather agitated about the plight of  male university students . On top of a front page story by Elizabeth Church yesterday pointing out the now rather well known fact that female undergraduate enrollment now outstrips male enrollment by a margin of 58% to 42%, they editorialize today as follows:
“Indira Samarasekera, the president [...]

I purchase a monthly unadjusted Labour Force Survey data series from StatsCan that provides monthly labour force trends by age, sex, province, and type of job (full-time, part-time, by industry, and by status – self-employed or employed). This is a helpful addition to the published monthly stats in The Daily, which use seasonally adjusted [...]

PEF member Salimah Valiani has written a report, released today by No One is Illegal, on the topic of temporary migrant workers in Canada, and a quiet but important shift in our immigration policies. The full report can be downloaded here and the abstract follows:

This report elaborates the shift in immigration policy which began unfolding [...]

From Kathleen Lahey, a Law professor at Queen’s University:
Budget  2009:
Designed to Leave Women Behind  – Again
The big picture:    Women make up slightly more than half the population of Canada, and are directly responsible for caring for the majority of minor children in the country on a day to day basis.
The expectation:    As an ‘economic recovery’ [...]

I just got back from a week in New York City with my wife, in which, among other things, we went to see five Broadway shows (I know the best way to get cheap tickets now). It was during the intermission to Rent that it finally hit me that something must be done about a [...]

 The CLC today released - on the eve of International Women’s Day - a major report on women and economic equality.   I’ll be presenting it at the PEF meetings in June.
The report flags a question which is not posed often or clearly enough - why has the pay (and wider opportunity) gap between women and [...]

A recent StatsCan research paper by Marc Frenette and Simon Coulombe “Has Higher Education Among Young Women Substantially Reduced the Gender Gap in Employment and Earnings?” (Analytical Research Paper Series. June, 2007) contains some rather startling data.
http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/11F0019MIE/11F0019MIE2007301.htm
The paper looks at employment and earnings for young men and women aged 25 to 29, in each of [...]