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Economy blows past expectations, adds 259000 jobs in February – The Tri-City News

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OTTAWA — Canada’s economy added 259,000 jobs last month, whipping past expectations to pull the country closer to pre-pandemic employment levels, with young women staring at the longest road to recovery.

One year into the pandemic, Canada’s job market is 599,100 jobs short of where it was in February of last year, or 3.1 per cent below pre-pandemic levels.

The shortfall is higher for young workers at 10.2 per cent, with young women between the ages of 15 and 24 the most affected group through this pandemic. 

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Statistics Canada said Friday that young women are down 181,000 jobs from February 2020, or off 14.1 per cent from pre-pandemic levels. For young men, the shortfall is 96,000, or 7.3 per cent.

The details add to the portrait of the pandemic’s disproportionate economic impact on women, dubbed the “shecession,” that the federal Liberals hope to address through a panel of experts that first met with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland on Thursday.

“It reminds us that the shecession is not just mothers,” said Vass Bednar, executive director of McMaster University’s master of public policy program, and former chair of a federal expert panel on youth employment.

“There might be other reasons that women’s jobs are either being eliminated, or that they need more support coming back to the labour market.”

Ottawa has suggested it will use jobs as a gauge for planned stimulus measures to be unveiled in a spring budget. 

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the gains good news for workers and their families, Conservative critic Pierre Poilievre warned the government can’t yet pat itself on the back as he called for tax reform and other measures to get more people back to work.

The Bank of Canada is also monitoring employment data, noting the uneven impacts of job losses in its reasoning this week for holding its key interest rate target at 0.25 per cent.

Overall, the gain in February almost wiped out the 266,000 jobs lost over the previous two months, as lockdowns from December and January lifted in much of the country. 

Almost all the job increases were among low-wage and part-time workers in areas like retail and accommodation.

The Conference Board of Canada noted the reopening of many retail outlets, mainly in Quebec and Ontario where lockdowns were particularly strict, brought back 122,300 jobs in February after losses of almost 168,000 jobs in January.

BMO chief economist Douglas Porter said similar gains could soon be seen in other hard-hit sectors like restaurants, hotels and entertainment if restrictions ease further.

“There is hope that as those sectors are eventually able to reopen, that we could recover quite quickly,” Porter said, adding he expects another gain in March.

The gains blew past expectations and were reminiscent of the first wave of the pandemic when employment rebounded far faster than expected as the economy began reopening, CIBC senior economist Royce Mendes wrote in a note.

The national unemployment rate fell to 8.2 per cent, the lowest level since March 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The rate would have been higher, 10.7 per cent, had Statistics Canada included in calculations Canadians who wanted to work but didn’t search for a job.

The youth unemployment rate fell to 17.1 per cent in February, compared with the 10.4 per cent in the same month last year. 

Typically, the youth unemployment rate is higher for men than women, but that trend has flipped during the pandemic, Statistics Canada said.

The agency noted that half of young women are employed in three highly affected sectors: accommodation, food services and retail.

“The higher unemployment rate is actually because of the labour market turbulence. It’s not because of young women leaving the workforce by choice, for example, to go back to school,” said Leah Nord, senior director of workforce strategies at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

Nord said the figures speak to an urgent need for focused training programs so young workers can gain new skills, and improve what they already have.

Bryn de Chastelain, chair of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, said the federal government should expand a key summer jobs program to help students cover tuition and earn experience in troubled job market.

“Students are not feeling that they’re going to have an opportunity to get valuable work experience in their field of study and start to build the skills that they need in order to start a career,” said de Chastelain, a graduating student at Saint Mary’s University.

Employers may have to relax the premium they place on experience when hiring a young person, or shift their perspective to include things like volunteering, as many may now have experience gaps in formal employment, Bednar said.

“People might not be able to get that first job as easily as before and it’s really agitating for a generation of workers that is already set to fare worse than the generation before them,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 12, 2021.

Jordan Press, The Canadian Press

<!– Photo: 20210311140348-604a74090e90790dcd8e0fd8jpeg.jpg, Caption: People line up at a Service Canada office in Montreal on Thursday, March 19, 2020. Statistics Canada to detail February jobs data
Statistics Canada will say today how the country’s job market fared in February after it started 2021 with a steep drop. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson –>

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Economy

Britain's economy went into recession last year, official figures confirm – The Globe and Mail

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Open this photo in gallery:

People walk over London Bridge, in London, on Oct. 25, 2023.SUSANNAH IRELAND/Reuters

Britain’s economy entered a shallow recession last year, official figures confirmed on Thursday, leaving Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with a challenge to reassure voters that the economy is safe with him before an election expected later this year.

Gross domestic product shrank by 0.1 per cent in the third quarter and by 0.3 per cent in the fourth, unchanged from preliminary estimates, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Thursday.

The figures will be disappointing for Mr. Sunak, who has been accused by the opposition Labour Party – far ahead in opinion polls – of overseeing “Rishi’s recession.”

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“The weak starting point for GDP this year means calendar-year growth in 2024 is likely to be limited to less than 1 per cent,” said Martin Beck, chief economic adviser at EY ITEM Club.

“However, an acceleration in momentum this year remains on the cards.”

Britain’s economy has shown signs of starting 2024 on a stronger footing, with monthly GDP growth of 0.2 per cent in January, and unofficial surveys suggesting growth continued in February and March.

Tax cuts announced by finance minister Jeremy Hunt and expectations of interest-rate cuts are likely to help the economy in 2024.

However, Britain remains one of the slowest countries to recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of last year, its economy was just 1 per cent bigger than in late 2019, with only Germany faring worse among Group of Seven nations.

The economy grew just 0.1 per cent in all of 2023, its weakest performance since 2009, excluding the peak-pandemic year of 2020.

GDP per person, which has not grown since early 2022, fell by 0.6 per cent in the fourth quarter and 0.7 per cent across 2023.

Sterling was little changed against the dollar and the euro after the data release.

The Bank of England (BOE) has said inflation is moving toward the point where it can start cutting rates. It expects the economy to grow by just 0.25 per cent this year, although official budget forecasters expect a 0.8-per-cent expansion.

BOE policy maker Jonathan Haskel said in an interview reported in Thursday’s Financial Times that rate cuts were “a long way off,” despite dropping his advocacy of a rise at last week’s meeting.

Thursday’s figures from the ONS also showed 0.7 per cent growth in households’ real disposable income, flat in the previous quarter.

Thomas Pugh, an economist at consulting firm RSM, said the increase could prompt consumers to increase their spending and support the economy.

“Consumer confidence has been improving gradually over the last year … as the impact of rising real wages filters through into people’s pockets, even though consumers remain cautious overall,” Mr. Pugh said.

Britain’s current account deficit totalled £21.18-billion ($36.21-billion) in the fourth quarter, slightly narrower than a forecast of £21.4-billion ($36.6-billion) shortfall in a Reuters poll of economists, and equivalent to 3.1 per cent of GDP, up from 2.7 per cent in the third quarter.

The underlying current account deficit, which strips out volatile trade in precious metals, expanded to 3.9 per cent of GDP.

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How will a shrinking population affect the global economy? – Al Jazeera English

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Falling fertility rates could bring about a transformational demographic shift over the next 25 years.

It has been described as a demographic catastrophe.

The Lancet medical journal warns that a majority of countries do not have a high enough fertility rate to sustain their population size by the end of the century.

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The rate of the decline is uneven, with some developing nations seeing a baby boom.

The shift could have far-reaching social and economic impacts.

Enormous population growth since the industrial revolution has put enormous pressure on the planet’s limited resources.

So, how does the drop in births affect the economy?

And regulators in the United States and the European Union crack down on tech monopolies.

The gender gap in tech narrows.

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John Ivison: Canada's economy desperately needs shock treatment after this Liberal government – National Post

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Lack of business investment is the main culprit. Canadians are digging holes with shovels while our competitors are buying excavators

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It speaks to the seriousness of the situation that the Bank of Canada is not so much taking the gloves off as slipping lead into them.

Senior deputy governor, Carolyn Rogers, came as close to wading into the political arena as any senior deputy governor of the central bank probably should in her speech in Halifax this week.

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But she was right to sound the alarm about a subject — Canada’s waning productivity — on which the federal government’s performance has been lacklustre at best.

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Productivity has fallen in six consecutive quarters and is now on a par with where it was seven years ago.

Lack of business investment is the main culprit.

In essence, Canadians are digging holes with shovels while many of our competitors are buying excavators.

“You’ve seen those signs that say, ‘in emergency, break glass.’ Well, it’s time to break the glass,” Rogers said.

She was explicit that government policy is partly to blame, pointing out that businesses need more certainty to invest with confidence. Government incentives and regulatory approaches that change year to year do not inspire confidence, she said.

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The government’s most recent contribution to the competitiveness file — Bill C-56, which made a number of competition-related changes — is a case in point. It was aimed at cracking down on “abusive practices” in the grocery industry that no one, including the bank in its own study, has been able to substantiate. Rather than encouraging investment, it added a political actor — the minister of industry — to the market review process. The Business Council of Canada called the move “capricious,” which was Rogers’s point.

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While blatant price-fixing is rare, the lack of investment is a product of the paucity of competition in many sectors, where Canadian companies protected from foreign competition are sitting on fat profit margins and don’t feel compelled to invest to make their operations more efficient. “Competition can make the whole economy more productive,” said Rogers.

The Conservatives now look set to make this an election issue. Ontario MP Ryan Williams has just released a slick 13-minute video that makes clear his party intends to act in this area.

Using the Monopoly board game as a prop, Williams, the party’s critic for pan-Canadian trade and competition, claims that in every sector, monopolies and oligopolies reign supreme, resulting in lower investment, lower productivity, higher prices, worse service, lower wages and more wealth inequality.

(As an aside, it was a marked improvement on last year’s “Justinflation” rap video.)

Williams said that Canadians pay among the highest cell phone prices in the world and that Rogers, Telus and Bell are the priciest carriers, bar none. The claim has some foundation: in a recent Cable.co.uk global league table that compared the average price of one gigabyte, Canada was ranked 216th of 237 countries at US$5.37 (noticeably, the U.S. was ranked even more expensive at US$6).

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Williams noted that two airlines control 80 per cent of the market, even though Air Canada was ranked dead last of all North American airlines for timeliness.

He pointed out that six banks control 87 per cent of Canada’s mortgage market, while five grocery stores — Sobeys, Metro, Loblaw, Walmart and Costco — command a similar dominance of the grocery market.

“Competition is dying in Canada,” Williams said. “The federal government has made things worse by over-regulating airlines, banks and telecoms to actually protect monopolies and keep new players out.”

So far, so good.

The Conservatives will “bring back home a capitalist economy” — a market that does not protect monopolies and creates more competition, in the form of Canadian companies that will provide new supply and better prices.

That sounds great. But at the same time, the Conservative formula for fixing things appears to involve more government intervention, not less.

Williams pointed out the Conservatives opposed RBC buying HSBC’s Canadian operations, WestJet buying Sunwing and Rogers buying Shaw. The party would oppose monopolies from buying up the competition, he said.

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The real solution is to let the market do its work to bring prices down. But that is a more complicated process than Williams lets on.

Back in 2007, when Research in Motion was Canada’s most valuable company, the Harper government appointed a panel of experts, led by former Nortel chair Lynton “Red” Wilson, to address concerns that the corporate sector was being “hollowed out” by foreign takeovers, following the sale of giants Alcan, Dofasco and Inco.

The “Compete to Win” report that came out in June 2008 found that the number of foreign-owned firms had remained relatively unchanged, but recommended 65 changes to make Canada more competitive.

The Harper government acted on the least-contentious suggestions: lowering corporate taxes, harmonizing sales taxes with a number of provinces and making immigration more responsive to labour markets.

But it did not end up liberalizing the banking, broadcasting, aviation or telecom markets, as the report suggested (ironically, it was a Liberal transport minister, Marc Garneau, who raised foreign ownership levels of air carriers to 49 per cent from 25 per cent in 2018).

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The point is, Canada has a competition problem but solving it requires taking on vested interests. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has indicated he is willing to do that, calling corporate lobbyists “utterly useless” and saying he will focus on Canadian workers, not corporate interests.

“My daily obsession will be about what is good for the working-class people in this country,” he said in Vancouver earlier this month.

Even opening up sectors to foreign competition is no guarantee that investors will come. There are no foreign ownership restrictions in the grocery market (in addition to the five supermarkets listed above, there is Amazon-owned Whole Foods). When the Competition Bureau concluded last year that there was a “modest but meaningful” increase in food prices, it recommended Ottawa encourage a foreign-owned player to enter the Canadian market. It was a recommendation adopted by Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, to no avail thus far.

But it is clear from the Bank’s warning that the Canadian economy requires some shock treatment.

Robert Scrivener, the chairman of Bell and Northern Telecom in the 1970s, called Canada a nation of overprotected underachievers. That is even more true now than it was back then.

It’s time to break the glass.

jivison@criffel.ca

Get even more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

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