Canada’s labour market stagnated again in June. Employment edged up by only 7,000 as the working-age population grew by 30,000. In response to this job shortage, 17,000 Canadians dropped out of the labour force. Canada’s economy is not generating nearly enough jobs to keep pace with the number of available workers. The good news is that employers replaced 22,000 part-time […]
Read moreIn case anyone was wondering about the effectiveness of right to work laws in suppressing unionization, here is a chart of Union coverage rate by State (the percentage of all employees that are covered by a collective agreement) as of 2010.  Right to work states have an asterisk, and are outlined with a black dotted line. (Chart updated, original scale was wrong). […]
Read moreOccasionally we can still get a glimpse of the radical difference between modern and pre-modern concepts of time. A significant number of Marshall Islanders have migrated to the U.S. According to a recent story in the NY Times (july 4): “They puzzle over the American obsession with time…” The principal of an Arkansas school where 30% of the studenst are […]
Read moreFurther to my recent post on the Ontario PC party’s proposal for right-to-work laws in that province, here is a slightly longer version of my column in today’s Globe and Mail:
Read moreJust in time for Canada Day, the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business issued its annual Top 1000 rankings of the thousand largest publicly traded companies (by assets) in Canada (ranked by profit). I blogged about this last year as well. It’s such an interesting snapshot of Canadian business it’s worth perusing. Once again, this listing reveals the extent to which […]
Read moreFurther to Jim’s post on the recent ratcheting up of the war on unions, I note that Hudak’s lead argument is that voluntary union membership is needed to “make unions more responsive to unionized employees.” (p6) “Labour laws” it is alleged “have given union leaders substantial power with little or no accountability.” (p9) The basic idea seems to be that […]
Read moreThe main story in today’s GDP numbers is that the oil, gas and mining industries rebounded sharply in April after being hobbled by temporary maintenance and production difficulties in February and March. While the upswing in fossil-fuel and mineral extraction was large enough to boost the overall economy, other key sectors showed signs of weakness. Manufacturing looked like a bright […]
Read moreIt’s clear we’re going to have to gear up our arguments on right-to-work laws, dues check-off, the Rand Formula, etc. In the last year three mainstream parties have introduced proposals for right-to-work style legal changes in Canada (Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party, the Wild Rose Alliance, and now yesterday Tim Hudak’s Ontario PCs). This used to be terrain solely inhabited by the […]
Read moreFurther to my earlier post on the OECD and “Dutch Disease”, I have received a heavily redacted response to an access to information request (A-2012-00073/CN.)Â submitted to the Department of Finance, seeking any comments on the draft assessment and recommendations of the OECD delegation to Canada in 2012. This arrives just as Conservative ads attack the “risky economic theories” of […]
Read moreSmall business – or at least the CFIB – consistently claim to be the big job creators in the economy. This has never been borne out by the available data on net job growth by firm size. And Statscan has now added to our knowledge by releasing a new paper and new CANSIM data today. The paper looks at the […]
Read moreWell well, another misinformed tax freedom day has come and gone on June 12th. To mark the occasion this year I wanted to skip over the very serious methodological flaws that others have pointed out, and take a look at several other items that Canadians are “free of” at various points. By gaining “freedom†from the taxes that Canadians pay we also […]
Read moreLast week, Conrad Black launched a $1.25-million libel lawsuit against me, Random House of Canada and its editors over four sentences in my book “Thieves of Bay Street†that discuss his case. You can see the National Post article here about the suit: http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/06/22/conrad-black-suing-publisher-for-1-25m/ While I won’t argue the merits of the suit on this blog at this time, I […]
Read moreToday’s report that the national inflation rate fell to 1.2% in May deflates calls for higher interest rates to reduce inflation. The central bank’s core rate was 1.8%, also below the 2% target. The other argument for an interest-rate hike was to moderate mortgage lending and the housing market. However, the federal government’s move to reign in mortgage lending through […]
Read moreSeen in isolation, Finance Minister Flaherty probably did the right thing yesterday in seeking to safely deflate the housing bubble and lower the dangerous growth of household credit to a record level as a share of household income. But he did it very late in the game, and risks tipping an already very fragile economy into recession if he and […]
Read moreI have the following letter in today’s Prince Albert Daily Herald (page 4): Reinvest Resource Wealth in Saskatchewan To the editor: I strongly agree with the title of MP Randy Hoback’s letter: “Siphoning money out of the west is wrong†(June 9). My proposal is to keep more money in Saskatchewan by collecting more provincial royalty revenue from the extraction […]
Read moreResources(\”staples\”) trap is Canadian Disease
Read moreStatistics Canada reported today that the number of Canadians receiving Employment Insurance (EI) dropped by 29,000 in April. Meanwhile, the Labour Force Survey indicates that unemployment rose by 14,000 in April (and by a further 8,000 in May). The combination of falling EI coverage and rising unemployment means that tens of thousands more jobless workers are not getting benefits. In total, […]
Read moreToday we released a new Climate Justice Project report, Clean Electricity, Conservation and Climate Justice in BC: Meeting our energy needs in a zero-carbon future, co-authored by John Calvert and myself. The report is central to the vision we have been developing of a zero-carbon BC, with a focus on the need to transition off of fossil fuels and the […]
Read moreAn international poll commissioned by the International Trade Union Confederation found very strong support in many countries, including Canada, for the introduction of Financial Transactions Taxes (FTTs), such as the Robin Hood Tax.  Trade unions provided results of this poll in their meetings with world leaders at the G20 meetings in Los Cabos, Mexico. Despite initially low recognition of FTTs in […]
Read moreStatistics Canada has released their latest data on job vacancies today, in the Daily. In March 2012 there were 5.8 job seekers for every job vacancy in Canada, down from 6.5 in March 2011. This is mostly because there were about 57 000 fewer unemployed in March 2012 than there were in March 2011, but there were also about 19,000 […]
Read moreThere is a very interesting interview with PEF’s own Marc Lavoie here on the Naked Capitalism site on his new book. Monetary Economics was co-authored by Marc with the late Wynne Godley. (Make sure to start by linking back to Part 1.)
Read moreA thoughtful short essay by Wolfgang Streeck, concluding with a reflection on how extreme inequality gets in the way of a needed de-emphasis on crude economic growth.
Read moreThe Harper government currently lists 18 different sets of free trade negotiations “in play.” (See my recent post on this.) Today the government announced (from the G-20 meetings in Mexico) the 19th: Canada has been invited to join the Trans Pacific Partnership talks. The TPP negotiations were initiated several years ago bya number of smaller Pacific countries. The Obama government […]
Read moreAnother sad tombstone to the shrinkage of information for informed social and economic policy – Statscan has decided to discontinue “Perspectives on Labour and Income” in both print and online format. For as long as I can remember, Perspectives reliably provided a firm empirical base for policy debate on key labour market and income issues -Â everything from rising income […]
Read moreI’ve worked closely with Erin for years, being struck by his combination of talent & passion right from the time he entered the PEF’s student essay contest (which he won for the first time exactly a decade ago, awarded at the CEA 2002 meetings in Calgary). Thirty-six other economists and I think he’d make a great contribution to economic policy […]
Read moreToday’s Statscan release of income data for 2010 allow for a backward glance at the state of the recovery. What is most striking is that – following two years of flat income growth in 2008 and 2009 – there was no meaningful economic recovery for most Canadians in 2010. Median earnings (half earned more, half earned less) were slightly down […]
Read moreThe Harper government decided to attack Thomas Mulcair on the issue of Canadian support for additional IMF resources to deal with the euro area crisis, implying that Canadian taxpayers should not be asked to “bail out” a rich area of the world. As recounted in Macleans here, on June 8, “Before QP yesterday, the Conservatives used four members’ statements—from Shelly […]
Read moreOECD economist Peter Jarrett – lead on the just released Economic Survey of Canada – agrees with the Mulcair diagnosis.
Read moreThe following is another guest post by Robyn Allan: A report recently released by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute claims Canada does not suffer from the Dutch disease. Unfortunately, the studies the authors draw on for this conclusion are riddled by it. The Dutch disease is a situation where rapid export of a nation’s raw resources along with rising commodity prices inflates […]
Read moreI 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 profession. This past weekend’s meetings in Calgary were no exception. A highlight, of course, was the 3rd Biennial Galbraith Lecture delivered by Mike McCracken, CEO and Chair of Informetrica, Inc., […]
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