Economy
Women, racialized peoples must remain focus as Canadian economy recovers from COVID: report – Saanich News
While B.C.’s unemployment rate has continued to shrink as pandemic restrictions loosen, a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released this month shows that not all is as good as it seems.
“The top line good news story hides the deep inequalities in the impact of the pandemic, particularly by gender and by race,” said Iglika Ivanova, the centre’s senior economist and public interest researcher.
Between February and April 2020, about 25 per cent of workers lost their jobs or the majority of their hours, largely concentrated among people in industries where people could not work from home. According to Ivanova’s report, those workers were most likely to work in lower-paid workers in part-time, temporary and more precarious jobs.
Many of these workers were women and many were racialized or Indigenous. The report provides three reason as to why women were particularly hard-hit; they were more likely to work in sectors such as hospitality, food services arts and culture which were targeted in restrictions, they were more likely than men to need to take care of children when schools and daycares closed and they were overrepresented in part-time and temporary job which were the first to be cut when the pandemic hit.
And when these women were also Indigenous, racialized, disabled or otherwise marginalized, the report noted, the intersection of inequalities made it even more likely that they would lose their jobs. While overall, while one-quarter of all workers lost their jobs, nearly one-third of women did.
These workers who lost their jobs, Ivanova said, have been hurt at each side of the pandemic – more likely to lose it at the start and less likely to regain it throughout. Ivanova said that while the decisions made to protect public health – closing down restaurants, large-scale events and other gatherings – may have been logical, they’ve had the unintended side effect of pushing these workers out of the workforce for as long as 16 months.
“So we see some sectors and some industries like accommodation and food services, and like personal services, and, you know, the recreation and culture services, you know, impacted, you know, in a much bigger way than other than other sectors of the economy,” Ivanova said.
“Those service sectors that that bore the brunt of the pandemic are the lowest paying sectors, and they tend to employ a lot more women and a lot more racialized and Indigenous workers than the sectors that did well.”
While the virus did not target any specific groups, Ivanova said it laid bare “the fact that even in the 21st century, our labor market remains quite occupationally segregated.”
The workers “are already disadvantaged on the number of other fronts, because they are the low wage, the young workers, the immigrant workers, the racialized workers.”
As B.C. looks towards economic revival, and as provincial and federal supports fade, Ivanova said that efforts need to focus on bringing the groups most hurt by the pandemic up to par with where they were prior to the pandemic – or even higher.
Ivanova said that as restrictions continue to lift – B.C. is now in Step 3, allowing all but the biggest of events and international travel – more people will regain their jobs. But not everyone will, and government programs need to keep that in mind.
“This is what really worries me now as we go into the summer and we’re going to start seeing better (unemployment) numbers come out of Canada… that that will make people conclude that the job is done, and we don’t need to do anything else, while in reality, these top line good news stories are really hiding enormous inequalities, and the people who bore the brunt of the pandemic are going to be left behind,” whether it is because they were unable to return to the same hours as they had pre-pandemic or people no longer actively looking for a job. The last group, Ivanova said, doesn’t factor into traditional unemployment numbers – only people actively job searching are counted – but could include people who worked in industries that cannot operate due to COVID restrictions. Those people, she said, may not be looking for jobs – because they don’t exist – but they will need government aid or retraining programs for career fields that are in-demand now.
READ MORE: Statistics Canada report says pandemic job losses hit women harder than men
The report outlined three policy initiatives to help workers still struggling.
The first involves large-scale, people-centric investments into both physical and social infrastructure.
”The care economy, which is currently gendered, racialized and undervalued should be rightfully recognized as the foundation upon which the larger economy is built,” the reported stated, noting that investments in this field involve not just building more child care and long-term care facilities or housing but also increasing the budget for the wages that pay the people who provide these services.
Second on the CCPA’s list is to “make all jobs good jobs.
“As we think about creating more jobs, we need to focus not just on the quantity, but on the quality of jobs we’re creating,” Ivanova said, “that those jobs are good jobs, that they pay a living wage, that they offer enough hours, so people don’t have to have three or four of them to make a decent living.”
Some of that, she acknowledged, was done during the pandemic when B.C. created a single-site order for care homes, ensuring that employees were based at just one facility.
“We absolutely can afford a lot more. Canada is a very rich country and B.C. is a very rich province,” Ivanova said. “It was just a choice that we may note the baby for more, and I hope is one of the things we learned from
The third initiative the CCPA proposes is to overhaul the income and social support systems to make them both easier to navigate and sufficient to support the people who rely on them.
The federal government is currently reviewing the Employment Insurance system and Ivanova hopes that one of the things to come out of that is a minimum level of support, instead of calculating benefits a percentage of prior income.
“If you were a minimum wage worker earning part time, and you were barely scraping by now you’re gonna get 55% of that? That’s nothing,” she said.
“I hope we see the Canada Emergency Response Benefit rates of $2,000 a month as a kind of floor.”
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
Economy
PM: Millennials and Gen Z drive Canadian economy – CTV News
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
PM: Millennials and Gen Z drive Canadian economy CTV News
Source link
Economy
Federal budget is about ensuring fair economy for ‘everyone’: Trudeau – Global News
Delivering remarks to his Liberal cabinet during a caucus meeting on Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau emphasized that the newly-announced federal government is intended to help create a fair economy for “everyone” in Canada, particularly those from Millennials and Gen Z.
Economy
Russia to grow faster than all advanced economies says IMF – BBC.com
An influential global body has forecast Russia’s economy will grow faster than all of the world’s advanced economies, including the US, this year.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects Russia to grow 3.2% this year, significantly more than the UK, France and Germany.
Oil exports have “held steady” and government spending has “remained high” contributing to growth, the IMF said.
Overall, it said the world economy had been “remarkably resilient”
“Despite many gloomy predictions, the world avoided a recession, the banking system proved largely resilient, and major emerging market economies did not suffer sudden stops,” the IMF said.
The IMF is an international organisation with 190 member countries. They are used by businesses to help plan where to invest, and by central banks, such as the Bank of England to guide its decisions on interest rates.
The group says that the forecasts it makes for growth the following year in most advanced economies, more often than not, have been within about 1.5 percentage points of what actually happens.
Despite the Kremlin being sanctioned over its invasion of Ukraine, the IMF upgraded its January predictions for the Russian economy this year, and said while growth would be lower in 2025, it would be still be higher than previously expected at 1.8%.
Investments from corporate and state owned enterprises and “robustness in private consumption” within Russia had promoted growth alongside strong exports of oil, according to Petya Koeva Brooks, deputy director at the IMF.
Russia is one of the world’s biggest oil exporters and in February, the BBC revealed millions of barrels of fuel made from Russian oil were still being imported to the UK despite sanctions.
Away from Russia, the IMF downgraded its forecasts across Europe and for the UK this year, predicting 0.5% growth this year, making the UK the second weakest performer across the G7 group of advanced economies, behind Germany.
The G7 also includes France, Italy, Japan, Canada and the US.
Growth is set to improve to 1.5% in 2025, putting the UK among the top three best performers in the G7, according to the IMF.
However, the IMF said that interest rates in the UK will remain higher than other advanced nations, close to 4% until 2029.
The group expects the UK to have the highest inflation of any G7 economy in 2023 and 2024.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said the IMF’s figures showed that the UK economy was turning a corner.
“Inflation in 2024 is predicted to be 1.2% lower than before, and over the next six years we are projected to grow faster than large European economies such as Germany or France – both of which have had significantly larger downgrades to short-term growth than the UK,” he said.
Conflict in the Middle East
Economists at the IMF warned that if the Israel-Hamas conflict escalates further in the Middle East it could lead to rising food and energy prices around the world.
Continued attacks on ships in the Red Sea and the ongoing war in Ukraine could also affect the so far “remarkably resilient” global economy, it said.
A potential spike in food, energy and transport costs would see lower-income countries hardest hit, it added.
-
Sports16 hours ago
Team Canada’s Olympics looks designed by Lululemon
-
Real eState24 hours ago
Search platform ranks Moncton real estate high | CTV News – CTV News Atlantic
-
Tech23 hours ago
Motorola's Edge 50 Phone Line Has Moto AI, 125-Watt Charging – CNET
-
Politics20 hours ago
Political interference in Canada’s pension funds is wrong
-
Business14 hours ago
Firefighters battle wildfire near Edson, Alta., after natural gas line rupture – CBC.ca
-
Sports21 hours ago
‘BOTTCHER BOMBSHELL:’ Alberta curling foursome set to move forward without skip
-
News21 hours ago
Freeland tables her fourth federal budget — this time with a tight focus on housing
-
Investment17 hours ago
Stephen Poloz will lead push to boost domestic investment by Canadian pension funds