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 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.

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.)

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: