Last year’s labour stats weren’t looking too positive to begin with: the unemployment rate which measures people who are “actively” looking for work was slowly declining while the employment rate which quantifies the percentage of working-age people employed had stagnated. Statistics Canada’s recent announcement of revisions to its estimates for job gains only makes the the situation more sobering — dropping the total to 121300 new positions from 185700 and raising the year’s unemployment rate to 6.7 per cent from 6.6 per cent.
“One thing that really stood out to me was that the employment rate in December — the last month covered — was down to the same level it was in June 2009 which was the worst point of the recession” says Jim Stanford an economist with Unifor. “We bounced back for a couple of years but now the jobs being created aren’t even keeping up with population growth. That’s a pretty miserable performance.”
Stanford connects the lack of job creation to the federal government’s push to eliminate the deficit instead of solving the employment issue a decision he suggests is related to the “Canadian success story” of avoiding the worst effects of the global meltdown. But that “self-congratulation” he says can’t last long. The American economy’s finally on the mend; that fact combined with the crash in oil prices drove the Canadian dollar below 80 cents US for the first time since April 2009.
“The government really has taken it for granted that Canada was supposedly a success story” says Stanford. “They believed their own propaganda that jobs were being created in large numbers. But the reality is that the labour market is in a condition almost as bad as it was in the worst days of the recession.”
Compounding news of the revision was a brief media flurry regarding the absence of employment rates on First Nations reserves in Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey (LFS). Statistics Canada has never recorded such numbers although the rate’s roughly pegged between two and three times the national average. In 2001 an estimated 26 per cent of people living on reserves were unemployed while in 2006 the number dropped to 23.1 per cent.
It’s a reality that Darrell Rankin leader of Manitoba’s Communist Party argues is exploited by large companies to maintain a “reserve army of labour” a phrase coined by Karl Marx to explain how unemployment is maintained to keep wages down. Refusing to count aboriginal people as workers allows governments to ignore the issue he says in addition to breaking up the potential for solidarity among workers (the “get a job” rhetoric often found in the comment section of articles about poverty on reserves seems adequate proof of that).
“If we don’t even know the number of unemployed aboriginal people then we cannot even begin to solve the problem” says Rankin. “There needs to be a genuine job creation policy to build housing and clean water facilities on reserves; that would create a short-term set of jobs. The focus should be on better schools and child-care centres and any of the other institutional things that are lacking in reserves that are enjoyed by the non-aboriginal communities.”
Statistics Canada has been facing funding cuts along with many other federal institutions across the country; the organization’s budget decreased by 9.3 per cent in 2014. While Unifor’s Stanford emphasizes that revisions of job estimates occur frequently as newer population data comes in the quality of the statistics produced by Statistics Canada have “definitely deteriorated” over the years he says.
