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Friday, January 3, 2014

There's Harper/Flaherty Economics and then there is the truth

Harper has silenced the civil service by forced staff reduction and the appointment of a variety of sock puppets who are not capable of thinking for themselves, they say and do only what they are ordered to do believing it is the right thing regardless of who it hurts.

We are constantly being told that Canada has performed the best within the G7. While there is some truth to this fairy tale, being the best of the worst is not something to brag about.

With the outlook for growth diverging sharply, the G7 countries are split into two camps – the United States and Canada are expected to grow at around 2% in 2012 and Japan’s economy is also likely to see its output rise by a similar amount as the country rebuilds from last year’s devasting tsumani and earthquake. On the other hand, the outlook for European economies is darkening. With the debt crisis in the eurozone countries continuing to swirl and showing no sign of easing, the IMF in its latest forecast expects the region’s GDP to contract by 0.5% this year. Italy, the regions third largest economy is projected to decline by 2.2%, by far the worst performer of any G7 economy.

It is now abundantly clear that, more than two years after the end of the Great Recession, a sustained recovery remains stubbornly elusive for the major advanced economies. Despite massive amounts of monetary and fiscal stimulus, the rate of growth in all of the major advanced economies has been sharply below their respective long-term averages. Moreover, constrained by large debts and deficits, not a single G7 country is expected to achieve growth rates above, or even at, its long-term average for several more years.

Further to their misrepresentation of the facts Canada's growth in GDP has not reached its pre financial collapse rate of growth and has only seen modest figures due to the oil sands and mining. When we look at manufacturing, which was at the core of Canada's employment and GDP figures we see a major crisis growing under this Conservative government.

The CPC are the bad jobs party. 

An in-depth report done in 2013 by McMaster University and the United Way looked at how people living in the Greater Toronto/Hamilton area are making out in today's economy. Researchers found barely one-half of the working population had what could be called a good job, meaning permanent employment with benefits; the rest lived a precarious existence.

In Canada's largest urban setting the workforce is broken in half, with the poor and the near poor facing complex health and family problems caused by economic insecurity.

Unifor economist Jim Standford focused on what is happening to employment among working-age Canadians. His finding show that job creation in Canada has stalled, barely keeping up with the growth in population. Prime age workers are exiting the job market, leaving the employment rate (the percentage with a job) at its lowest since 2002.

More people than it appears have no job. Using widely available statistics, Angella MacEwen of the Canadian Labour Congress has shown that the real Canadian unemployment rate is about double the official unemployment rate.

Numbers from last June showed the jobs situation was worse in vote-rich Ontario. Add the people working part-time looking for full-time work and the people who have quit looking for jobs that do not exist, to the 8.6 per cent in Ontario who are officially unemployed, and the real rate of unemployment in Ontario is 18.4 per cent, over twice the rate heard on the radio or reported in the press. 

Instead of taking the dire situation facing the unemployed into account when deciding who gets access to EI benefits, analysis done by Angella MacEwan points to the CPC using EI premiums to try and balance the budget.

More....
http://rabble.ca/columnists/2013/12/bad-jobs-party-seeing-through-harpers-claims-about-canadas-strong-economy

http://rangachand.com/commentary/2012/01/e7-growth-performance-trumps-g7/

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