Canada’s youth are still waiting.
The 2012 federal budget not only missed the opportunity to create a youth employment strategy, it actually eliminated Katimavik, a program that could have been reoriented, redefined and expanded to meet our labour market needs.
Continue reading “A youth employment strategy would look like this”
The challenges immigrants face in finding jobs have to do with not just the characteristics and skills they bring to the labour market, but also the state of our economy and the barriers put in their way. More and more tinkering with the selection rules used to admit immigrants will not on its own address these challenges.
In a post on my blog I called for lower rates of immigration during business cycle downturns, and a reader commented by saying:
I arrived in Canada in July 2011 with my family and was called for exactly one job interview a couple of weeks ago. To say I am scarred is putting it mildly. I left a very successful career with the knowledge that it will be difficult to get a similar position but I never anticipated that I would end up feeling invisible and a non-entity with absolutely nothing to offer. Since coming here I have been shelling out money for everything, university fees for my kids and so on. Other than contributing to the Canadian economy through our expenses, I feel immigrants are not considered to be of any particular value.
It struck me how odd and incomplete the public policy response by Canadian opinion makers and governments is to this kind of concern.
Continue reading “Immigrants face challenges in finding jobs that are not of their own making”
This morning Statistics Canada reported that the unemployment rate increased to 7.6%, confirming a rising trend since July of last year and still significantly above the low of about 6% just before the recession took hold in the autumn of 2008.
This statistic is probably the closest a number can come to having a human face; it relates directly to the hardship Canadians experience in providing for their families, saving for their retirement, and just meeting their day-to-day needs.
But in the end we can’t clearly see the faces of real people behind this number, which at best is an incomplete picture of waste and hardship.
This morning Statistics Canada released–as it does on the first Friday of every month–estimates of employment and unemployment for the previous month.
As usual the headline number is the change in the number of employed, and the Agency’s press release announces that “Following two months of declines, employment rose slightly in December, up 18,000.”
But this masks as much as it reveals.
Continue reading “Facts about the labour market, the hidden and the missing”
“Jobs and Growth the Priorities as Minister Flaherty Hosts Pre-Budget Consultations”, screams the title of a press release from the Department of Finance issued about a month ago.
Jim Flaherty wants to hear from Canadians about how he can maintain the federal government’s “focus on jobs and economic growth while reducing the deficit.”
But this week is a particularly good time to first pose a few questions to him in the hope of clarifying some facts about jobs, unemployment, and the role of government policy.
Continue reading “Three questions to ask the Minister of Finance”
Economics for public policy 