Jason Kenney’s contradictory Twitter tirade over Kijiji jobs data

Published March 28, 2014

Jason Kenney is getting super defensive. After news broke this week that the Conservatives’ erroneous claim about job vacancies in Canada can be chalked up to job ads posted on the online classified site Kijiji, the Employment Minister has been on a one man mission to try to salvage what little remains of his government’s […]

Watch Jason Kenney tap dance around Kijiji-gate

Published March 27, 2014

Employment Minister Jason Kenney has been talking up Canada’s labour and skills shortage for months. This storyline got a boost last month, when the Conservative government released a report claiming the country’s job vacancy rate has been “increasing steadily since 2009.” Conveniently, this claim helped explain away the expansion of the controversial Temporary Foreign Workers […]

Joe Oliver gets it wrong on jobs 3 times in 30 seconds

Published March 26, 2014

The new Finance Minister is off to a rough start. Joe Oliver stood up in the House of Commons this week and delivered three misleading statements in just 30 seconds about the jobs record since the Great Recession. 1. Said 85% of jobs created have been full time A recent report released by the Canadian […]

So much for those “overpaid public sector workers”

Published March 18, 2014

Treasury Board President Tony Clement often sounds like a broken record, taking shots at the public service whenever he can. If he’s not complaining about a “complete disconnect” between public sector and private sector compensation, Clement is talking about clawing back salaries of public servants. Clement must have been disappointed, then, when his office was handed a […]

Canada’s jobs numbers are worse than you think

Published March 6, 2014

Updated March 7. Every month, Statistics Canada releases the country’s headline unemployment numbers that tell an incomplete picture. On Friday, even that partial picture looked bad: Canada’s job market “continues to sputter,” shedding 7,000 workers overall in February. There were 20,000 fewer men aged 25 to 54 working in February, while employment was virtually unchanged for the other demographic groups, leaving the topline […]

With friends like these: business group calls out Tories on crappy jobs record

Published March 4, 2014

When your government’s main talking point is about how well you’re managing the economy, it must really hurt when a business group says it’s been “a year of lacklustre job growth in Canada.” The Canadian Chamber of Commerce has done just that with a new report titled Canada’s Labour Market Sputtered in 2013. Some key findings: Employment grew […]