Canadian free trade negotiators are going all-out to get a deal with the EU on a new free trade agreement. The Harper government wants a deal badly for largely symbolic and ideological purposes, to show that the free trade agenda is back on track under this "stable majority government." Many valid concerns have been raised about the implications of a deal on pharmaceutical costs, on public procurement, and more. What would a Canada-EU deal mean for the auto industry? Here are a few summary points:

- Canada's auto industry would be especially hard hit by a free trade deal with Europe.

- Europe sells billions of dollars of auto products in Canada, but buys virtually nothing back from the Canadian auto industry.

There's an interesting new research report from Statistics Canada, by Ping Ching Winnie Chan, Rene Morissette, and Marc Frenette, profiling the workers who were displaced in the recent recession, and comparing the outcomes to previous recessions in earlier decades (the downturns of the early 1980s and 1990s). Workers Laid Off During the Last Three Recessions is part of StatsCan's Analytical Studies series.

I haven't been through the report in detail and can't comment on the methodology, but here are some of the interesting (and often surprising) findings:

Canadians are taking the recession into our own hands, and we have the employment numbers to prove it. Have we hit bottom? Not necessarily, but, hey, we the people aren't using this time of economic stagnation to stand still and do nothing.

That's the poetry of the new job numbers for April that came out last week.

The surprising tally shows that instead of declining, the number of jobs rose by 35,900 last month, despite constant news of layoffs both threatened and real.

I got a chuckle from Margaret Wente's saying yesterday that the pandemic story exploded in the mass (or mass hysteria) media because it was time to change the subject from the economy. Then I gasped: OMG -- what if it shifted not from tedium but paralysis? Right now, there's far more reason to panic about the economy than over a new flu. This recession emerged from a recent strain that's mutating, contagious and has no known cure. What if EGD (economic globalization disease) is the real pandemic?