The significant changes to the Employment Insurance (EI) program which are to be quickly implemented through Budget 2012 with very little consultation have not received enough critical attention.

First, a word on what is not in the budget. It is disappointing, to say the least, that the government is failing to respond to the fact that less than 40 per cent of unemployed Canadians are now qualifying for EI, well below the already low pre-recession rate. And, for all of the talk about skills shortages in Canada, it is notable that there is NO increased investment at all in EI-supported training, which would assist unemployed workers to find good jobs.

Instead, the focus is on tightening discipline over those workers who have managed to qualify for a claim.

As is well known, the youth unemployment rate remains high, and well above average. It stood at 14.1 per cent in November or more than double the unemployment rate of 6.3 per cent for persons aged 25 to 54, and 6.2 per cent for those aged 55 and over.

What is a little bit more surprising is that the youth unemployment rate, while down from the recession peak of over 15 per cent, has risen over the past year -- up by 0.5 percentage points -- while it has fallen -- by 0.3 per cent percentage points -- for those aged 25 and over.

Young people were hard hit by the recession, and have been mainly sitting on the sidelines during the recovery.

The just-released 2011 ILO World of Work Report is a must-read for progressive economists.

Released on the eve of the G20 meetings, the report underlines the gravity of the current global employment situation and warns of the need to put job creation first if we are to avoid a very extended period of high unemployment and rising incidence of precarious work. It emphatically calls for demand side measures to create jobs, along with job-friendly labour market policies.

It is no secret that times of high unemployment and precarious work are especially tough for new and recent entrants to the job market, notably young workers and recent immigrants. The latter were especially hard hit in the recession and slow recovery of the 1990s, when new immigrants had great difficulty finding decent jobs and it took longer and longer for immigrant earnings to catch up with those of Canadian-born workers.

The meeting of G20 Labour Ministers in Paris on September 26-27, held in advance of the November G20 summit in Cannes, reached some conclusions which go some (extremely modest) way toward living up to prior G20 commitments in London and Pittsburgh to promote quality jobs and a more progressive labour market model as part of a long-term solution to the global economic crisis.

Ministers met with trade union and employer representatives, including myself, in a half-day session on their first day of meetings, and the ILO, with the OECD, was also invited to participate. There was one labour representative per country at the meeting with Ministers (and more from France.)

Analysis from my colleague Sylvain Schetagne:

A decreasing unemployment rate is not always a sign of a strong labour market.

The decrease in the unemployment rate from 7.4% to 7.2% observed between June and July 2011 is mainly due to Canadians leaving the labour market, not to their finding jobs.

In July, the number of unemployed Canadians decreased by 35,700 simply because 28,600 people left the labour market at a time when only 7,100 jobs were created. In fact, if those workers had not left the labour market, the unemployment rate would have stayed the same.