On the surface, today’s employment numbers simply continue a recent trend: employers added some jobs but not enough to keep pace with Canada’s growing labour force. As a result, unemployment edged back up to 7%. But just below the surface were some even worse developments. Employers actually cut 29,000 full-time positions while adding 55,000 part-time positions in May. Over the […]
Read moreThe following is a guest post by Brendan Haley: Jim Stanford and I have written an assessment of the Ontario PC’s energy policy for Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives entitled Short Circuited. In particular, we look into the idea that cancelling renewable energy policies will lead to job creation. Here are some highlights: More Data Problems There has already been […]
Read moreThe 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 a firestorm of media coverage, inspired the Globe and Mail’s […]
Read moreFor the 15th consecutive year, the Progressive Economics Forum (PEF) will be sponsoring events at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Economics Association (which takes place this month in Vancouver). PEF events will take place this Friday and Saturday; details pertaining to all PEF events can be found at this link. Once again this year, I am the PEF Events […]
Read moreFurther 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 report simulated the corporate tax reduction I was discussing.
Read moreAs economics students around the world demand change in the curriculum and challenge their professors to open classrooms to pluralism in perspectives and views, the interest in heterodox economics is growing here in Canada too. You can see in the tremendous interest to this year’s PEF Summer School in heterodox economics, which we titled Economics that Works for People and […]
Read moreYesterday 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 known generically as social assistance). Among other things, I suggest […]
Read moreWhen 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, along with two commissioned consultants’ reports that were said to […]
Read moreToday 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 the 15 largest census metropolitan areas across Ontario, for which […]
Read moreStatistics Canada reported today that the number of Canadians filing Employment Insurance (EI) claims rose by 10,350 or 4.5 per cent in March, the largest monthly increase since the start of 2013. This national increase was driven by a jump of 9,480 or 12.9 per cent in Ontario, the largest monthly increase in the province since February 2009. Despite the […]
Read moreThe Parkland Institute is releasing a report on why unions matter. I contributed to the report, which was spurred by Alberta government restrictions on collective bargaining and anti-union labour law. Perhaps not surprising for readers of this blog, we found that labour unions play an important role in improving wages, improving workplace safety, and reducing inequality – for all workers, not […]
Read moreWhen he announced the sudden moratorium on new Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) in the restaurant industry, Employment and Social Development Minister Jason Kenney tried to reconcile this dramatic about-face with his government’s long-standing support for the whole idea of migrant guest-workers. So while strongly criticizing a few particular restaurants for their high-profile “abuses” of the program (even though it was usually […]
Read moreMy debate with Alex Usher on tuition fees continues, over at the Academic Matters web site. In my latest post, I make the case that Mr. Usher needs to consider Canada’s tax system when suggesting that reducing tuition fees is “regressive.”
Read more“Trickledown hadn’t worked. But Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one fourth of the GDP.” [Yesterday’s election results only promise to worsen that.] That’s how the extrordinary writer-and-activist Arundhati Roy, one of the world’s leading public intellectuals, describes contemporary capitalism in her new collection of essays […]
Read moreEarlier today, over at the Academic Matters web site, I addressed the issue of whether Canada’s current system of high tuition fees and means-tested student aid is in fact “progressive.” My post was a response to a Alex Usher‘s May 9 blog post. My blog post can be found here.
Read moreYou have to wonder what Andrea Horwath was thinking. By bringing down the Ontario government a week ago and launching an election as a result, the NDP risks opening the door for the provincial Tories reclaiming power. Which would be a disaster for working people across the province, let alone the social fabric of our communities. Yet Horwath’s decision is […]
Read moreMy 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 of labour demand). Is the decline in the employment rate […]
Read moreIt’s a bit of a headscratcher. First, Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak builds his whole campaign around a promise to create one million new jobs in Ontario over eight years, then one of his first campaign commitments threats  is to reduce the number of Ontario government employees by 100,000, together with a wage freeze for every government workers and lower spending […]
Read moreI’ve written a little bit about the importance of tracking underemployment trends, and this is particularly important when those trends diverge from the headline unemployment rate. This graph (12 month moving average of unadjusted monthly data) separates unemployed workers and underemployed workers. In recent years the number of unemployed workers has fallen slowly (partially due to falling labour force participation […]
Read moreToday’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 just over 66%.That’s the lowest level of labour force participation since […]
Read moreIt 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 — exactly the kind of “corporate welfare” that Mr. Hudak […]
Read moreToday we released a new report, Path to Prosperity? A Closer Look at British Columbia’s Natural Gas Royalties and Proposed LNG Income Tax, about liquefied natural gas (LNG ) development in BC, and the public revenues that might be expected. So far, LNG has lacked a real public debate. On one side, we have the drumbeat of the business press with […]
Read moreCapital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (Belknap Press, 2014) is the economics publishing sensation of our times, especially in the United States. Currently the number one seller on the US Amazon web site and widely debated in the “blogosphereâ€, this long book is being favourably compared to the seminal works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx […]
Read moreMore than one critic has noted that Russia doesn’t manufacture anything the world wants (a knock that now can be laid against Canada, especially since the dramatic fall of Blackberry and the bankruptcy of Nortel). Think about it: what product (or brand name) does Russia produce which people covet? Cars, smartphones, wine, airplanes, beer, other technological or Internet innovations – […]
Read moreHarold Innis wrote the history of Canada around its succession of staple exports, first to Europe and then to the US. He then wrote the history of empires and civilizations around the succession of media of communications. One of the bridges between these two phases of his work was the study of newsprint as a Canadian staple which supplied the […]
Read moreEarlier this month, I blogged about the At Home/Chez Soi homelessness study prior to the release of its final report. Today I’ve blogged again, this time about the contents of the final report itself. This second blog post, being rather long and nuanced, was written for the Homeless Hub. It can be accessed at this link.
Read moreYet 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 increase in unemployment levels by 4.8 percentage points in BC […]
Read moreMel Clark, a long time trade negotiator for Canada, passed away on March 14. His Notice of Death in the April 24 Globe and Mail describes him as “an independent and progressive thinker with a strong sense of social responsibility.“ “Mel`s decades of experience in the world of international trade had convinced him that free trade is necessary for the […]
Read moreI have just finished Piketty’s magnum opus which is clearly one of the most important economic books of our time. I am still trying to digest the theoretical argument. Below I provide a link and intro to an important commentary by Tom Palley who argues that Pikkety is too close to the neo classical paradigm re rewards to capital. This […]
Read moreThe Globe and Mail reports that the results of the Workplace Survey have sat on a shelf for two years due to cuts at Statistics Canada and a lack of funding from Employment and Social Development Canada. This, while the Minister for ESDC says that Canada’s labour market information is inadequate and “we need better data”. Perhaps the Minister can spare some of […]
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