Every time this government crows about its job creation record, I cringe. They have moved the finish line and declared victory. No reason to worry about the unemployed here, folks. Let's move on to more public service cuts, and/or tax cuts.

Never mind that unemployment has been in and around 7.4 per cent since the spring of 2011, nowhere near the 6 per cent prior to the recession. Never mind that there were nearly 300,000 more Canadians looking for work in October 2012 than there were in October 2008. So let's take a look at some of those claims.

1. "We've created over 800,000 jobs."

Leader of the Opposition Tom Mulcair gave a fine speech on the budget bill on October 24, which can be found in its entirety in Hansard.

I have posted some extracts of interest to progressive economists below. They echo many of the arguments made on this blog.

The annual Employment Insurance Coverage Survey is out, here. The rate of eligibility for regular benefits from Employment Insurance is the lowest since 2003, the earliest year that there is comparable data.

To qualify, a person must have worked in the past 12 months and contributed to Employment Insurance, they must have left their job for a valid reason (layoff is valid, quitting usually is not), and they must have worked between 420 and 700 hours depending on the unemployment rate in their region.

The Harper government likes to remind Canadians that we've done better than most developed nations in bouncing back from the global economic crisis. But digging into the data shows why many people might be having trouble cheering this news: wages have not kept pace with inflation, and new hires are making 40 per cent less than the average worker.

Tiff Macklem, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, recently brought home the official storyline: The level of employment is now higher than it was before the crisis; jobs are mostly being created in the private sector, most are full-time and are emerging in industries that pay above-average wages.

At times, the Fraser Institute produces such helpful material.

I hope they make their well-heeled funders, such as the multi-billionaire Koch brothers, proud. However, I'm sure the Kochs are more concerned about how missteps by their progeny Mitt and Ryan are derailing their chance to buy the U.S. presidency.

So back to the Fraser Institute and to three of their recent reports.

Four years after Lehman Brothers collapsed, it's time to take stock of things by asking a stock political question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

Where you stand on the answer depends on where you sit. Many people, businesses and communities are still struggling to regain the ground they lost after September 15, 2008, the day the giant investment banker filed for bankruptcy and triggered the biggest global financial and economic crisis since the 1930s. But for others, things have never been better.

For Canada as a whole, the top line numbers are good, as we've heard repeatedly from Ottawa.

A new paper by Jack Mintz (with Duanjie Chen) argues that "corporate tax reductions of more than 30 per cent since 2000 have, contrary to the critics' cries, failed to make an appreciable dent in tax revenues thanks to multinationals' habit of shifting profits to Canada to take advantage of lower rates."

This is the subject of a report in ipolitics, contrasting the argument of Mintz and Chen report to last year's "Corporate Tax Freedom Day" report by the Canadian Labour Congress.

In the spirit of "know thy enemy," I recently read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. (Note to the anxious -- I survived the experience, and remain a convinced left Keynesian democratic socialist.)

Hayek is, of course, the totemic figure of neoliberalism who fought Keynes and Keynesian economics in the 1930s and is the intellectual figurehead of today's "austerians"; the political theorist who, the right-wing mythologizers tell us, kept the  torch of market freedom alive during the dark days of post-war managed capitalism; the intellectual guru of Milton Friedman, Chicago school economics, and Alan Greenspan.

Kudos to Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney for raising the profile of the over $500 billion Canadian corporations are holding in excess cash surpluses and not investing in the economy, which garnered front-page coverage (and kudos to the CAW for inviting him to speak.)

Last May federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said there was no such thing as a bad job. The Law Commission of Ontario may disagree.

This week it put out a report about the rise in vulnerable workers and precarious jobs. Now that he's heard from executives who think Canadians are paid too much, Mr. Flaherty should consider the other side of the story, and the suggested fix.