Jobs Lost During the Recession Have Not Returned

cybercoma · May 9, 2014

The jobs numbers today are bad. Canada has lost 29000 jobs in April, while the unemployment rate remained the same as people give up hope and drop out of the labour market. The broader issue, however, is that we have not recovered from the 2008 economic crisis when it comes to employment. The percentage of working age population that have jobs fell dramatically after 2011 and has been trending downward for the last year, shown here:

Part of the problem is that the working age population is increasing, but there's not enough jobs for those people. Coupled with the issue of Temporary Foreign Workers and the skills shortage, it seems unfathomable that there are jobs without people and people without jobs.

So what do we do? How does Canada get the ball rolling again? Conservative policies don't appear to be working. So what's next?

GostHacked · May 9, 2014

Less people working mean less income tax revenue for the government. Meaning that public services need to be cut in some way.

Kill the temp foreign worker program. Then once we have a low unemployment rate again, we can start to look elsewhere for labour. Until then, there are plenty of motivated Canadians that will do the jobs.

And when talking about the skills shortage, you can point to the eduction system for producing a bunch of self important narcissistic wimps that have no critical thought process. When the discovery method is used, people will discover that they maybe qualified to work at Tim Horton's or something similar.

So for the skills, education needs to be looked at.

For the labour, kill the TFWP for now. Or reduce the need to critical positions that urgently need filling.

cybercoma · May 9, 2014

The government takes industry's word about the skills shortage when determining whether or not they can bring in foreign workers. Your characterization of youth as "self-important narcissistic wimps [who] have no critical thought process" is not only agist garbage, but relies on the word of industry that has a vested interest in claiming they can't find qualified labour.

TimG · May 9, 2014

Why don't you post of graph of the same data for that last 40 years?

Some how I doubt it would support the point you want to make.

monty16 · May 9, 2014

There's a Conservative policy that 'will' work and that is to bring down the wages of workers so that two can be hired for the price of one. This is the general trend south of the border where there is great to do about the minimum wage hike that Obama is pushing. Harper is slow on the uptake with his attempts to do that with immigrant labour in the fast food chains. That's never going to work in time! He needs to get into the serious territory of tearing down good living wages in the industrial sector. One worker being replaced by two for the same cost. Think of the gains in productivity!

Shady · May 9, 2014

The biggest problem is that the American economy remains depressed by bad economic and regulatory policy. None of that will change until there's a new administration unfortunately.

monty16 · May 9, 2014

In actual fact, the US economy is booming. It's just the people of the middle class and lower who are having problems. But if the Obama regime is replaced with a Republican regime then the economy will most certainly do even better. The key is in widening the record breaking income inequality they have established.

Shady · May 9, 2014

The U.S. economy grew at 0.1% in the first quarter of the year. That's basically zero.

monty16 · May 9, 2014

"U.S. economy is doing well, Chase's CEO says". You'll have to google it because this site doesn't seem to allow a cut and paste. And maybe you could look at the Dow too. But you're right if you take a look at the plight of the people of that country. It's apparently become the second worse case of income inequality in the world, following Mexico. Turkey comes in third. Ya think that sounds right?

cybercoma · May 9, 2014

Why don't you post of graph of the same data for that last 40 years?

Some how I doubt it would support the point you want to make.

The point that jobs haven't returned to the level they were at when the economic crisis hit? Why would I need data from the 1970s to show that?

GostHacked · May 9, 2014

The government takes industry's word about the skills shortage when determining whether or not they can bring in foreign workers. Your characterization of youth as "self-important narcissistic wimps [who] have no critical thought process" is not only agist garbage, but relies on the word of industry that has a vested interest in claiming they can't find qualified labour.

Even the government is using this program to fill positions. The industries are faking their numbers most likely to help them qualify for these programs. It's about saving money any way a corp can. So the program has been abused.

Why would I rely on their information to be accurate in this matter?

GostHacked · May 9, 2014

The biggest problem is that the American economy remains depressed by bad economic and regulatory policy. None of that will change until there's a new administration unfortunately.

You can keep hoping for change, but that won't happen even with the next POTUS.

monty16 · May 9, 2014

And jobs won't come back either because it's systemic as opposed to cyclical. If the people just resign themselves to working for 'fast food restaurant' wages then employers can hire lots of people and solve a big part of the unemployment problem. Why, in the industrial sector they could have 4 working for $7.50 an hour in the place of one!

Shady · May 9, 2014

You can keep hoping for change, but that won't happen even with the next POTUS.

Of course it could. I think even Hillary Clinton would approve keystone and the 44,000 jobs it would create.

GostHacked · May 9, 2014

Of course it could. I think even Hillary Clinton would approve keystone and the 44,000 jobs it would create.

But, she's a Democrat.

Shady · May 9, 2014

But, she's a Democrat.

Yep.

monty16 · May 9, 2014

Hillary will only do what's politically correct for her interests. That's the way it works in that country now. If Obama's footdragging proves to be politically correct for his interests, and it appears that it is, then Hillary certainly won't talk positively about it during her campaign.

TimG · May 9, 2014

The point that jobs haven't returned to the level they were at when the economic crisis hit? Why would I need data from the 1970s to show that?

You cherry picked a start date and proceed to make the claim that there is a huge problem because they have not returned to the levels at the start date. The trouble is the start date was at the peak of a bubble and the drop could be the result of a healthy deflation of that bubble. The long term data would give us the information necessary to assess whether the abnormal situation was in 2007 or today.

Mighty AC · May 9, 2014

Of course it could. I think even Hillary Clinton would approve keystone and the 44,000 jobs it would create.

The legal manufacturing and sale of all narcotics would create jobs, so should we allow it? Sucking our fresh surface and ground water bodies dry and selling it to China and the US would create jobs, so is that a good thing?

Mortgaging the future for short term profits is rarely a good decision.

bjre · May 9, 2014

That is because west propaganda media keep focus on politician’s personal issue like smoke so that politicians need not to care about it. That is so called democracy. Most people are unable to express what they really need to care about, and easily be played by media even when they lost jobs, they still don’t have any idea on what to do. If they need to protest, (like in G20), they really need neither to go to street nor Queen’s park, they should go to “CBC”, “Toronto star” and other media, protest them fool people and waster tax payer’s money on issues that has nothing to do with most people’s real interest. Ask them to focus on issues that affect most people. But still no use because media will not focus on that, that is the nature of “democracy”

cybercoma · May 9, 2014

Of course it could. I think even Hillary Clinton would approve keystone and the 44,000 jobs it would create.

And the other 605,000 jobs we're still short?

CPCFTW · May 9, 2014

The jobs numbers today are bad. Canada has lost 29000 jobs in April, while the unemployment rate remained the same as people give up hope and drop out of the labour market. The broader issue, however, is that we have not recovered from the 2008 economic crisis when it comes to employment. The percentage of working age population that have jobs fell dramatically after 2011 and has been trending downward for the last year, shown here:

Part of the problem is that the working age population is increasing, but there's not enough jobs for those people. Coupled with the issue of Temporary Foreign Workers and the skills shortage, it seems unfathomable that there are jobs without people and people without jobs.

So what do we do? How does Canada get the ball rolling again? Conservative policies don't appear to be working. So what's next?

Conservative policies are working fine. Why are we including retirees in any assessment of job creation? There are plenty of boomer generation public servants who are part of the WAP but who have retired with a healthy pension.

Also if you break down the employment numbers by private vs public, you'll find that public employment has remained essentially flat for the past 5-6 years while private sector employment is booming. Yes we could follow leftist economic policies by creating a million public sector jobs digging holes and filling them in if we want to artificially inflate our employment situation, but that is unproductive and destroys our long-term growth prospects.

Bonam · May 9, 2014

The data this is based on is obviously wrong. The graph shows a 2.3% difference in employment between 2008 and 2014 and claims that this relates to 665k missing jobs. This implies that the "working age population" (WAP) of Canada is 665000/0.023 = 29 million people. In reality, Canada's working age population is 23 million. Therefore the most prevalent claim made in the original graph is off by ~26% (there are only 529000 "missing jobs" according to this metric). Such an error casts doubt on the validity of any other numbers presented.

Edited May 9, 2014 by Bonam

monty16 · May 9, 2014

Creating jobs digging holes and filling them in could be a short term fix for the systemic unemployment problem. There are lots of unemployed who would rather do that as opposed to social assistance or unemployment enjoyment dole. And there's little doubt that the political right would rather have them doing something instead of getting all that free money. Too bad there are only two choices in Canada so far.

In the U.S. they can go out and collect pop cans or visit the dumpsters behind the grocery stores.

cybercoma · May 9, 2014

The data this is based on is obviously wrong. The graph shows a 2.3% difference in employment between 2008 and 2014 and claims that this relates to 665k missing jobs. This implies that the "working age population" (WAP) of Canada is 665000/0.023 = 29 million people. In reality, Canada's working age population is 23 million. Therefore the most prevalent claim made in the original graph is off by ~26% (there are only 529000 "missing jobs" according to this metric). Such an error casts doubt on the validity of any other numbers presented.

You didn't account for the change in population over time, which was mentioned in the article. One of the reasons the number of employed people as a percentage of the working-age population has gone down is that the WAP population has increased.