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Stephen Harper’s Temporary Canadian Worker problem

You thought Canada had a problem with temporary foreign workers? Actually, temporary work for Canadians is thriving under the Conservatives. New job numbers released Friday by Statistics Canada show a troubling trend underneath bad top line numbers that saw Canada shed 9,400 jobs in June: nearly one in four jobs created in the last 5 years has […]

You thought Canada had a problem with temporary foreign workers?

Actually, temporary work for Canadians is thriving under the Conservatives.

New job numbers released Friday by Statistics Canada show a troubling trend underneath bad top line numbers that saw Canada shed 9,400 jobs in June: nearly one in four jobs created in the last 5 years has been temporary.

This includes 252,500 jobs that have “a predetermined end date, or will end as soon as a specified project is completed.”

Overall, the number of permanent jobs has increased by 6.5% since June 2009, while temporary work has increased at nearly double that rate at 12.4%.

But when you break down the precarious job stats by age, workers between the ages of 25-44 saw a 18.2% increase in temporary work and only 4.9% in permanent jobs. That means temporary work represents nearly one-third of all jobs created in this age cohort (30.2%).

Young people have also been hard hit.

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The economy has shed 47,100 permanent jobs for youth aged 15 to 24 since June 2009, representing a permanent job net-loss of 2.8% for this cohort. But at the same time, temporary work has increased by 7.1%. (The June 2014 job numbers reinforce how much young people are struggling.)

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You don’t hear these inconvenient facts about temporary work when Conservatives repeatedly bragabout how over one million net new jobs have been created since the recession in “overwhelmingly full-time positions.” (They also probably won’t be talking much about the newest job numbers from June, with job-creation over the past year now at a meager 0.4% and the employment-to-population ratio down to 61.4%, just slightly above the low point hit late in the recession.)

Here’s the temporary work story that the Conservatives don’t want to talk about:

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