The real unemployment rate for Canadians over 25 was 8.8 per cent in April. Not great, for sure, but slightly better than it was in 2009.

For youth 15-24, it was up from last April -- to 20.9 per cent -- so more than 1 in 5 youth are looking for work and can't find it. In Ontario, it's closer to 1 in 4, and in P.E.I. it's 1 in 3.

If we look at the participation rate of youth aged 20 to 24, we see that it's actually fallen by 2 percentage points since the trough of the recession in July 2009. During the recovery, young people have been leaving the labour force.

The story of child poverty in Canada is very much an urban story. One out of every 10 children living in urban areas was poor in 2010, compared to one in 20 children living in non-urban areas. Three-quarters (or 76 per cent) of all poor children in Canada lived in one of the urban centres shown in the chart above.*

As I discussed in an earlier post, Niall Ferguson, the Harvard historian and author of numerous bad books about economics, is prone to writing and saying completely ignorant things, making one wonder about the intellectual heft of so-called academic "stars" who populate our institutions of higher learning.

As others have noted, last week's Ontario budget combined modest social investments in areas requested by the NDP with austerity for overall expenditures. Ontario program spending, already the lowest per capita of any province, will be subject to ongoing cuts relative to inflation.

This paradox on the expenditure side of the ledger reflects a vacuum on the revenue side. The budget's summary of tax measures (Table 4.1) is essentially a blank slate, particularly if one excludes measures that simply parallel federal changes.

1. He's Number Two: Stephen Poloz was widely acknowledged in economic and political circles as the second-best choice for the top job at the Bank of Canada. So the surprise was not that he was chosen. The surprise was, Why Not Tiff Macklem? Will someone please find out and tell the rest of us?

Attempts by the Harper government to set the record straight over recent changes to EI simply gloss over many valid concerns that have been expressed by critics. I share a couple of EI Change Fact-Busters in solidarity with upcoming rallies on EI that will be taking place across Canada this weekend.

Minister Finley states: "No one will have to take a job that puts them in a worse financial position than collecting EI alone."

Fact: The majority of EI claimants will have to accept 20-30 per cent lower wages, outside their usual profession, after only 6 weeks of job search.

Brian Lee Crowley's latest column shows he's a glass-half-full kinda guy. We shouldn't be worried about unemployment because a) it's old-fashioned, b) Boomers had it worse (and now they're getting old) c) we're doing better than the U.S., and d) it's really only young people and immigrants that are unemployed.

This is a relief.

Admirers and detractors of Margaret Thatcher can agree that she will be remembered as one of the key political architects of our times. Along with her soulmate, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, she broke decisively with the post-war Keynesian welfare state and ushered in the still-enduring age of neo-liberalism.

Lady Thatcher and her key advisers, such as Keith Joseph, were intellectually grounded in the work of the most prominent foe of John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and his American disciple, Milton Friedman. Her government explicitly set out to reverse the post-war growth in the economic and social role of democratic government, and to thereby restore business profitability and "confidence."

Reports of RBC outsourcing jobs to temporary foreign workers to replace existing Canadian employees should prompt a broader debate about the massive expansion of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in recent years. Is this program addressing genuine "labour shortages" or undermining job opportunities and wages in Canada?

The number of temporary foreign workers in Canada has more than doubled since the Harper government took office. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration reports the presence of 338,000 temporary foreign workers at the end of 2012.

Last week's report from B.C.'s Auditor General dealt a huge blow to the credibility of carbon offsets and claims that B.C. had achieved a state of "carbon neutral government." Coverage of the AG's report was coloured by accusations from the Pacific Carbon Trust, the Crown corporation created to buy and sell B.C.