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Think tank questions Conservative claims on jobs numbers

Think tank questions Conservative claims on jobs numbers

With a federal election on the way and a pre-election budget in the offing, a new report takes issue with the Conservative government’s claims about job creation.

The economy will be a plank issue for the ruling Conservatives but employment numbers have declined over the Tory tenure, says Andrew Jackson, author of the analysis and an economist with the Broadbent Institute.

His analysis of employment and unemployment figures from 2006 to 2014 also suggests a shift toward low-paying and part-time work in the jobs that have been created.

“The federal government is only one influence on the economy. There’s lots of other things going on and it would be absurd to give them all the blame or all the credit. That said, they’ve been making strong claims about their record using a particular construction of the numbers,” Jackson tells Yahoo Canada News.

“We’re certainly not back to where we were before the recession in terms of the job market.”

Jackson looked at Statistics Canada’s labour market data from 2006, when the Conservatives were elected, to 2014.

He analyzed the unemployment rate and the employment rate, breaking each down by age and gender. He also looked at employment figures by class of worker and by occupation, as well as employment rates by region.

“A close look at the data takes a good deal of shine off Harper’s lofty claims,” Jackson writes in his report.

Over the long term, the growth of full-time work is dwarfed by the growth of low-pay and part-time work, he says.

The overall employment rate has fallen from 62.8 per cent in 2006 to 61.4 per cent in 2014.

The unemployment rate in that time has increased from 6.3 per cent to 6.9 per cent, the report says.

“This is mainly because a proportion of Canadians have stopped looking actively for work, often because they think that no desirable jobs are available. Likely the employment rate has fallen a bit because more young people are staying longer in higher education due to the state of the job market. An ageing work force is also a factor.

The employment rate of young workers age 15 to 24 fell sharply from 58.5 per cent in 2006 to 55.5 per cent last year.

At the same time, the employment rate among those 55 and older increased from 30.5 per cent to 35.1 per cent.

Almost 40 per cent of the new jobs created from 2006 to 2014 were sales and service jobs, “which is the lowest paid occupational category,” Jackson says.

A pre-budget jobs report from the federal Finance Department says Canada’s labour market has outperformed other G7 economies since 2006.

There have been close to 1.6 million new jobs created in that time; one million since the economic recovery began in mid-2009, it says.

“Canada has demonstrated a remarkable job creation record in recent years,” the report says.

It has the strongest labour market performance of all G7 economies, it says.

“Moreover, high-wage, high-skilled, full-time and private-sector employment has been the main source of job creation over the recovery.”

The economic recession was not a made-in-Canada event, Jackson says. And recovery is tied to many factors beyond government control.

But there needs to be a policy debate about these issues in the run-up to the budget and the election, he says.

“One of the big questions is how we deal with this heavy tilt of job creation towards low-paid and precarious jobs? Should we be raising minimum wages? Income supplements for the working poor? How do we rebuild middle-class jobs in manufacturing and other sectors?”