Wednesday, February 3, 2016

An oil sands worker checks the oil during the first step of separation at the Suncor processing plant at their tar sands operations near Fort McMurray, in this file photo. (© Todd Korol / Reuters)

Canada’s labour market not keeping up with ‘changing times’: report

BARRIE MCKENNA
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail
Published 
Last updated 
The commodities price crash is exposing glaring holes in Canada’s labour market.
The country is losing medium-skilled jobs at an alarming rate and the system is ill-equipped to move workers to where they are needed, including high-skilled positions in other industries, according to a new report being released Tuesday by the C.D. Howe Institute, a Toronto-based economic think tank.
Alberta job losses worst since 1982 (BNN Video)
“Adjustment to the commodities price shock is creating more displaced workers,” former Toronto-Dominion Bank chief economist Craig Alexander argued in the report, Job One Is Jobs: Workers Need Better Policy Support And Stronger Skills.
And the job market is not keeping pace with the “changing times,” he said in the report. Signs of weakness abound, including a growing share of people doing part-time and other “precarious” work, a near-doubling of long-term unemployment since 2008, and diminishing medium-skilled jobs.
The problem isn’t just the oil shock. Globalization, technological change and the aging population are all putting strains on the labour market, said Mr. Alexander, the C.D. Howe Institute’s vice-president of economic analysis.
“Globalization and technical change is depressing demand for middle-skilled jobs, which are likely to come under further pressure in the years ahead due to weaker prospects in the resource sector and cooling in real estate-related construction activity,” the report said.
Mr. Alexander said the solutions include overhauling employment insurance (EI) to eliminate regional differences in eligibility rules as well as a renewed effort to “up-skill” the work force.
He also called for putting much better labour-market data into the hands of employers and policy makers, while helping to bring “underutilized pools of labour” into the work force, including young workers, immigrants and aboriginals.
Mr. Alexander called on the federal government to take the lead in fixing the flaws in the system. “It is a very Canadian challenge in that no single level of government is responsible for labour market policy and this can lead to an absence of leadership,” he said.
Among the problems identified in the report is that EI covers only about half of unemployed Canadians and is much more generous in chronically high unemployment areas, such as Atlantic Canada. An Albertan needs 700 hours of work to qualify, compared with just 420 hours in most of Atlantic Canada.
“Regionally based eligibility criteria should be replaced by uniform, countrywide, employment insurance entrance requirements and benefit durations,” the report said.
The country must also do a much better job of boosting the supply of the kinds of high-skilled workers that are in high demand, including pushing more students to take more degrees in science, technology, engineering and math.
Among the report’s other recommendations:
- The federal Liberals should keep more older workers in the labour force by abandoning a pledge to roll back the eligibility for Old Age Security to 65 from 67.
- The Liberals should also drop a promise to increase taxes on corporate stock options because it’s inconsistent with “wanting to build a more entrepreneurial culture.”
- Canada should also properly value the education and skills of new immigrants.
- Invest more in language training for refugees.
- Improve labour mobility by harmonizing varying provincial licensing, certification and occupational qualifications.
- Improve literacy among aboriginals.
Follow Barrie McKenna on Twitter: @barriemckenna
 

THE SOURCE: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/jobs/canadas-labour-market-not-keeping-up-with-changing-times-report-says/article28494862/

cOMMENT:

"A Reality Check

Workers and Demographics

The dismal fact situation underpinning the attached bank report on Canada’s dysfunctional labour market could have been written in 1660 by French North American Governor Jean Tallon or in 1890 by Clifford Sifton .

Tallon petitioned King Louis to solve the colony’s labour /demographic problem by asking the church to bring in hundreds of young brides known as the King’s daughters. Thus was born Canada’s historically successful reliance on Europe and the corporate church to build our economy and stabilize our demographic growth.    

After Tallon came Clifford Sifton. In the 1890’s Sifton successfully sent his Canadian Pacific railway officers into my grandmother’s village looking for strong backed farmers and their big breasted wives. (Believing that the Austrian emperor would assure peace in Europe, my slight grandmother avoided  Saskatchewan and Alberta.)

In 1991 or so , Ottawa sent an official , Mike Malloy, to Toronto’s Glendon College to advise the churches that ,after a successful run of over 300 years, Canada would henceforth rely on computer administered economic immigrant programs to meet Canada‘s demographic  and labour needs.

Between 1986 and 2015, employers and Europeans were not welcome in the immigration process.   

To quote Mr. Malloy at Glendon College : “immigration bingo is over”.

The last three hundred and twenty five years have taught the following lessons:

  • Since the 1600’s Canada’s education system has been unable to generate the nation’s skilled worker requirements

  • If you want state funded abortion you better be ready to bring in a lot more  young ,healthy, willing women immigrants and then provide decent day care on a massive scale

  • Canada’s labour market succeeds when Europeans and employers are not vigorously , and concurrently, avoided

  • The crash of each and every computer administered economic immigrant program has assured the tanking of several Canadian labour markets  
  • Tallon and Sifton succeeded because they put their faith in industry being able to absorb committed, proven folks recruited by those with a direct industrial self-interest. Tallon and Sifton would never have tolerated paper pushing consultants pimping and defrauding the visa system 

  • Mike Malloy failed because he put his blind faith in administrators using the new technology to create and manage an economy while avoiding fraud. It didn’t help that many of the administrators became leading visa pimps


To paraphrase Pierre Trudeau: Perhaps there should be less room for the state’s “command and control” bureaucracy in the nation’s immigration process"
Richard Boraks, February 2 2016

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