Younger Workers, Older Workers and the Recession
Sylvain Schetagne and I have been looking at key changes in the job market over the past two years of recession and partial recovery using the Labour Force Survey data for October 2008 and October...
View ArticleDeath of the Tiger: A Cautionary Irish Tale
This blog has been posted on behalf of Bruce Campbell, Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The first version of this piece originally appeared in the blogosphere at the...
View ArticleThe Polls and the Proles
The polls are suggesting a Harper majority may be in the cards, but they may be counting out the wild card in this deck: young people. How do polls work? Pollsters call people. On land lines. Who...
View ArticleHow to Help the Long Term Unemployed
The OECD have weighed in on what policy measures are needed to limit the damage of long term unemployment in the aftermath of the Great Recession. I would judge the NDP platform – which includes a...
View ArticleThe Kids Are Not All Right
As is well-known, young people are still bearing the brunt of the recession. The employment rate for youth aged 15-24 last month was 55.6%, well down from 60.3% back before the recession in September,...
View ArticleOntario Student Debt
Last week, the CCPA released a paper by David Macdonald and Erika Shaker entitled Under Pressure: The Impact of Rising Tuition Fees on Ontario Families. The paper does a good job of explaining which...
View Article“Grade-Boosting” Stimulant Use on Campus
A recent editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal looks at the use of “grade-boosting” stimulants (such as Ritalin) by Canadian post-secondary students. According to the editorial:...
View ArticleWilliam Watson on PSE
On Wednesday, William Watson wrote a comment piece in the Financial Post in which he was critical of Armine Yalnizyan’s recent essay on inequality. In his piece, Mr. Watson alleges that Armine “is...
View ArticleStudent Debt Rising Amongst New Physicians
Newly-released data indicate that student debt is rising amongst new physicians in Canada. In 2010, 23 percent of medical residents reported having more than $120,000 in education-related debt upon...
View ArticleFederal Post-Secondary Education Act
Last month, the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) released a document entitled Public Education for the Public Good: A National Vision for Canada’s Post-Secondary Education System. I found the...
View ArticleSitting on the Sidelines: Young Workers Miss Out on the Recovery
As is well known, the youth unemployment rate remains high, and well above average. It stood at 14.1% in November or more than double the unemployment rate of 6.3% for persons aged 25 to 54, and 6.2%...
View Article“Real” Youth Unemployment Rate Close to 20%
Statistics Canada’s “real” (R8 supplementary) unemployment rate adds to unemployed persons some labour force dropouts (discouraged job seekers who have given up looking for a job in the belief that no...
View ArticleNew Generation of Thinkers Link Inequality, Innovation and Prosperity
(This guest blog was written by Mike Marin and Anouk Dey. It originally appeared in the Toronto Star on February 24. The authors are part of a team that produced the report Prospering Together (in...
View ArticleThe Affordability of Post-Secondary Education
Carleton University’s Ted Jackson teaches a graduate seminar course on post-secondary education in Carleton’s School of Public Policy and Administration. Earlier this month, I was invited to give a...
View ArticleKatimavik
I am sure readers of this blog are not unsympathetic to the case for a government supported program which, at a time of very high youth unemployment, annually enables some 1500 young people to...
View ArticleWho’s a bigger drag on Canada’s future? The old or the young?
This is my latest column for Canadian Business magazine. Giorgio, a hard-working, smart-as-a-whip University of Toronto student, asked me a great question after a recent guest lecture: What if the...
View ArticleRex Murphy’s Naive Take on the Quebec Student Protests
On CBC’s The National last night, Rex Murphy weighed in on Quebec’s student protests; the transcript can be found here, and the three-minute video here. He calls the protests “short sighted,” points...
View ArticleDiscussing Quebec Student Protests on Talk Radio
Last Friday, I blogged here about the Quebec student protests. Subsequently, I was invited to appear on 580 CFRA News Talk Radio, with hosts Rob Snow and Lowell Green. I should note that Mr. Green is...
View ArticleQuebec Students: “Faire Leur Juste Part”
Simon Tremblay-Pepin, an emerging social policy scholar, has recently blogged here (in French) about Quebec tuition fees. He points out that, when one adjusts for inflation, Quebec tuition fees are...
View ArticleYouth Unemployment
Here’s the link to a TVO The Agenda panel I was on this Friday. Good to put some focus on the fact that the “real” unemployment rate for young people is 20%, while the youth employment rate is down a...
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